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Mercedes-Benz CLA will arrive in 2014

The CLA has its official world premiere on April 23 at Auto China in Beijing.

The luxury carmaker has a big push into the more affordable end of the market. It has announced the A-Class hatch for Australia from 2013 with prices around $30,000 and this week unveils a pre-production four-door sedan version, called Concept Style Coupe by Mercedes but simply dubbed the CLA.

But Mercedes Australia says we won't see the new sedan until 2014. Based on the A-Class platform, the CLA is a mini-CLS with a low-roof profile, tapered roofline and long overhangs. 

Mercedes plans the CLA to share drivetrains with the A-Class but has dropped a clanger by announcing the possibility of an all-wheel drive version with a 156kW four-cylinder turbo-petrol engine. 

The head of Mercedes-Benz Cars and chairman of parent company Daimler AG, Dr Dieter Zetsche, says the CLA will become "the model against which sporty vehicles in the executive segment will have to measure themselves in future''. 

The CLA has its official world premiere on April 23 at Auto China in Beijing. The show car wears 21-inch wheels with perforated pins on the spokes to follow the diamond-theme of the radiator grille. 

It has frameless side windows and no B-pillar. It also has four individual seats with integrated head restraints that are shared with the sports version of the A-Class.

 

Neil Dowling
Contributing Journalist
GoAutoMedia Cars have been the corner stone to Neil’s passion, beginning at pre-school age, through school but then pushed sideways while he studied accounting. It was rekindled when he started contributing to magazines including Bushdriver and then when he started a motoring section in Perth’s The Western Mail. He was then appointed as a finance writer for the evening Daily News, supplemented by writing its motoring column. He moved to The Sunday Times as finance editor and after a nine-year term, finally drove back into motoring when in 1998 he was asked to rebrand and restyle the newspaper’s motoring section, expanding it over 12 years from a two-page section to a 36-page lift-out. In 2010 he was selected to join News Ltd’s national motoring group Carsguide and covered national and international events, launches, news conferences and Car of the Year awards until November 2014 when he moved into freelancing, working for GoAuto, The West Australian, Western 4WDriver magazine, Bauer Media and as an online content writer for one of Australia’s biggest car groups. He has involved himself in all aspects including motorsport where he has competed in everything from motocross to motorkhanas and rallies including Targa West and the ARC Forest Rally. He loves all facets of the car industry, from design, manufacture, testing, marketing and even business structures and believes cars are one of the few high-volume consumables to combine a very high degree of engineering enlivened with an even higher degree of emotion from its consumers.
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