Mercedes CLA EV (2025)

As I turned up to a charging hub at a garden centre in Memmingen, saw these two 'Erlkönig' camouflaged, prototype Mercedes with a further big Mercedes EQE EV, accompanying them, hooked up to 3 of the 5 chargers. 

As the chargers are HPC 300kWh units with two cables, plenty of room for me. As I was about to manoeuvre into a bay, one of the Merc people stopped me and asked me not to park alongside one of them. These big chargers split the charge if two cars on them, 150kWh each.

Naturally I agreed - hadn't been planning on it anyway, although for my car which can 'only' charge at 135kWh max, I didn't have a problem sharing. However, what it probably indicated was the prototypes are likely to be first Mercedes with 800 Volt technology, double the rate most EVs have. And thus they need the full rate for their banks of equipment in the boot, (alongside coffee thermos flasks & sandwiches), monitoring how well the cars perform. The Koreans, Hyundai and Kia, use the 800V technology already.

Seems to me Mercedes has been the slowest of the German manufacturers to get in to EV gear. They can all be blamed for making only high profit, highend, large, expensive models and while they are saying the CLA will be their car for the smaller purse, it's still going to cost around €50,000 for the basic model. This is not going to pick-up the masses and drive the move to EV.

The other seemingly strange thing is the time it takes to get the  new cars into the showrooms.  Here we are in November 2023, the car, still dusguised in part, is being presented to the press in December 2024, but still journalists not allowed to sit behind the wheel. 

While they ate their sandwiches and drank their thermos flask coffee, I ate the döner I'd picked up around the corner and then went into the lovely warm garden centre and had a very good €1.00 fresh coffee.