If you remember your high school prom night, you may also remember the astonishment of witnessing some of your classmates dressed to the nines in swirly dresses and sharp creased tuxedos. Classmates you may have overlooked on a daily basis all of a sudden appeared different, more sophisticated, some even sexier.
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| 2006 Mercedes-Benz CLS 500 (photo: John LeBlanc, straight-six.com) |
Essentially a widened and stretched Mercedes-Benz E Class sedan with a new set of duds and a swankier interior, the 2006 CLS Class is one sharp dressed car and proof that the clothes really do make the man, or in this instance, the car.
First seen as the Mercedes-Benz CLS Vision concept car at the 2003 Frankfurt show, subjectively, the CLS is the most beautifully proportioned and eye-catching Benz since the Mercedes SL sports cars of the '50s and '60s. And based on reactions from both young and old driving this car for a week, you can add "jaw-dropping" to that list of adjectives as well. With its tapered rear end styling, large character line cutting through the length of the car ending up over the front wheel arches, chopped-top glass house proportions, and boomerang headlights, the CLS doesn't look like anything else on the road today.
In the burgeoning family of Mercedes coupes, the
CLS 500 sits between the CLK 500 ($78,800) and the CL 500 ($138,750). Of course,
Mazda RX-8 and Saturn Ion Coupe owners may take offence with Mercedes' print ads boasting the CLS as "the world's first four-door coupe", but with a $92,600 base price for my CLS 500 test car, and $125,600 for the 469 horsepower CLS 55 AMG model that borrows the Lysholm-supercharged 5.4-litre vee-eight from the E 55 AMG, maybe Mercedes meant to say "the world's most expensive four-door coupes".
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| 2006 Mercedes-Benz CLS 500 (photo: John LeBlanc, straight-six.com) |
Semantics aside, the CLS certainly feels like a coupe on the inside. Compared to an E, the roof has been lowered and the beltline has been raised. Mercedes also went as far as to extend the centre console through to the back seats making the CLS strictly a four-seater. However, that swoopy rear roofline means those relegated back there are best to be young in age or short in height.
The CLS 500's driver instrumentation and HVAC controls will look and feel familiar if you've been in an E 500 ($84,600) recently. Inside the instrument cluster, analog clock, speedo and tachometer are finished with chrome ring accents and the fuel gauge and coolant temperature are shown with vertical electronic bar graphs. The centre dash incorporates Mercedes still
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| 2006 Mercedes-Benz CLS 500 (photo: John LeBlanc, straight-six.com) |
awkward COMAND system with its colour display. Above that you'll find the four-zone climate control, and below is the 6-disc CD changer hidden by aflip panel that can be accessed with a touch of a button. So far, just like an E.
However, the surrounding trim and interior architecture appears as if some Jaguar designers snuck into the Swabian design offices one night and got a hold of the CAD/CAM systems. Generous use of chrome, wood and double-stitched leather, plus a voluptuous U-curved centre console are all there to remind you this is a different kind of Mercedes.
