Setting records at Italy’s banked Nardo Ring is kind of a regular thing for Mercedes-Benz small sedans. In 1983, the then-new 190E 2.3-16 managed to cover 50,000 km at high speed, there, in just under 202 hours, at an average speed of 247.9 km/h. For the new EV version of the upcoming CLA, Benz went back to Italy, and managed to crack a 24-hour record held by the Porsche Taycan.
If this just seems like bragging rights, that’s only part of the deal. Mercedes beating Porsche’s flagship EV sport sedan with its entry-level EV makes for some pretty good cross-Stuttgart rivalry, but the way it did so does actually mirror some interesting real-world conditions.
First though, the record itself. Over the aforementioned 24-hour period, held April of this year, a pre-production battery-electric CLA managed to cover a distance of 3,716 km (2,309 miles), stopping to charge some 40 times. The feat saw the car parked at a fast-charger for a little over a quarter of the time period, which brought the average speed down to 153 km/h. If you’re looking at that 1983 record and thinking that four decades of progress to lose 100 km/h is nothing to brag about, here’s how Mercedes broke the Taycan’s 24-hour distance record by almost 300 kilometres.
Instead of fast-charging to full each time, the Mercedes team plugged in any time battery levels got down to 10%, and then quick-charged on the CLA’s new 800V architecture to get batteries back up to 55% before heading out again. Instead of racing the Taycan on vehicle speed, it was charging speed that mattered, here — basically, pit strategy won the day.
The reason this is perhaps applicable to the real world is how long these stops took: about 10 minutes each. Filling a gasoline car up to full from about a third of a tank takes around eight minutes, so a ten-minute stop is pretty comparable. Plug in, check your emails and social media feeds quickly, then get back on the road. At this pace, you could drive from B.C. to the Maritimes in a little over two days, assuming there were enough chargers (and no speed limits).
The CLA didn’t need to use almost half of its battery pack, and that begs the question: are expensive long-range packs really the path to mass EV adoption? Probably not. If there was simply enough reliable charging infrastructure, you don’t need all this range. Smaller packs bring prices down, and perhaps that’s how we see EVs making up a bigger percentage of the market.
As for the CLA itself, it somewhat hilariously seems to have accomplished this record with the right rear door handle not retracting flush. This car rides on Mercedes’ new modular architecture, which it’s dubbed MMA. No doubt it intends to try to put BMW’s small sedans in a chokehold. Electric models will lead the way for the new CLA when it launches next year, with hybrid ICE models to follow.
It’s a different kind of record than that set by the 190E, but similar in terms of the message Mercedes is trying to send to potential customers. In the 1980s, the company wanted to show you that its small sport sedan could go the distance, reliably. With this new record, it’s still about going the distance, and doing so without the hassle of long charging times.
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