McCurley Integrity Dealerships

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Driving Impressions

The Mercedes-Benz CL550 we tested is a swift and smooth ride to be sure, but we'd stop short of calling it a sports sedan. It's simply too large, too soft and too luxurious. But it is rewarding to drive for just those reasons.

You start the CL with a touch of a big aluminum button to the right of the steering column. We still wonder why being able to keep the key in your pocket makes this a better solution. Then drop it into gear with a column-mounted electronic shift lever similar to the kind BMW is now using. Purists may feel it's an odd and un-sporty throwback to have a shifter moved off of the center console and on to the steering column, but it works well and frees up space.

The 5.5-liter all-aluminum 32-valve V8 is velvety smooth and nearly silent, until you prod it. With 382 hp on tap it rushes the car to speed with a muted, purposeful growl. The seven-speed automatic gearbox shifts imperceptibly in town, smoothly at full throttle and never gets caught in the wrong gear in traffic. Quiet, smooth, sophisticated: This is the way the powertrain in a high-end luxury automobile should behave.

Having a gasoline-fired engine this powerful pulling a vehicle this heavy does create a gas mileage penalty, or two actually. The first is real-world fuel economy: The EPA mileage rating is 14/21 mpg, City/Highway. And that figure triggers the federal Gas Guzzler Tax at purchase, $1300 in this case.

If there's one word that describes the CL road experience, it's silken. On smooth surfaces it feels as if it's riding on glass. Some vibration or road harshness must be penetrating the hushed cabin, but it just doesn't feel like it. The sportier BMW 6 Series coupes register bumps harder and reveal surface imperfections far more acutely. In the Benz, the smaller road irregularities get glossed over. Over larger bumps the ride is less supple than you might expect, almost firm, but not enough to inspire the driver to attack the curves.

The steering has a ball-of-silk feel, less sharp than in the BMW and more relaxed in its responses. Though the steering effort rises with road speed, the feeling remains comfortable, smooth and luxuriously isolated rather than sports-car sharp. This is a car that works its way down a winding road with grace and stability, and the active suspension keeps it cornering quite flat. But the CL doesn't communicate the sense of the road in the way that great sports sedans do. It never gives you the urge to get aggressive, as a BMW 3 Series would.

On the highway, the CL's German DNA is fully in evidence. It has a commanding, solid feel and is dead stable even at extra-legal speed. It's in these upper speed ranges that you notice that wind noise has hardly increased at all. This is autobahn breeding at work.

Using the optional Distronic Plus distance sensing cruise control is an eerie and fascinating experience. The radar-based distance monitoring system automatically slows the CL, using the brakes if necessary, as you close the gap on the car in front. That distance can be set between a hundred and several hundred feet. When the system detects the lane ahead is clear again, it accelerates back to your pre-set speed. All the driver needs do is steer, an odd sensation to say the least. The system works beautifully in light Interstate traffic and reasonably well in moderately denser intra-urban highway environments, though it sometimes annoyed us by slowing sooner for a car up ahead than an average driver would in most circumstances.

There's more to Distronic Plus than active cruise control. The system is tied into a comprehensive in-car safety network. It will sound an alarm if the driver is gaining too fast on the car ahead, meanwhile priming the Brake Assist Plus system to apply full emergency braking as soon as the driver presses on the brake pedal, no matter how lightly it's applied. If the driver doesn't respond to the distance alarm, the system will apply up to 40 percent of total braking capacity automatically to slow the car down.

The Distronic Plus system includes Blind Spot Assistance, with additional sensors in the rear bumper that detect other vehicles approaching in those hard-to-see, over-the-shoulder-and-behind zones to either side. If you signal a lane change or begin to steer from your lane, an arrow lights up in the appropriate side mirror, green for all-clear, yellow for caution.

The Dynamic Rearview Monitor has an enhanced function that scans the size of a parallel parking space and determines if the CL will fit. As before, shifting into reverse activates the camera, and grid lines appear on the speedometer to help guide you into the parking space.

The infrared night vision systems actively projects infrared light from the headlamps. An infra-red camera discreetly mounted in the windshield receives the reflected images and displays them in a high-resolution display in the instrument cluster. The result is akin to a highly detailed black-and-white video image.

Meanwhile, if a frontal crash is imminent, the Pre-Safe Brake system takes action: It tightens the front seat belts milliseconds before impact, moves the front passenger seat to its safest position, closes the side windows to add support for the side-curtain airbags (and to keep occupants' arms inside the vehicle), initiates partial braking to slow the vehicle and will even close the sunroof in a rollover.

We found that, in normal driving, the CL's brakes were confident, effortless and luxuriously insulated. The brake pedal action is progressive and direct. You won't find a smoother set of brakes anywhere. In hard braking the system feels powerful and was free of any fade. Decelerations from even high speed were calm, quiet and drama-free, with not a bit of vibration or noise transferred through the brake pedal or into the cabin. Again, thank the requirements of German autobahn driving.

The CL600 comes with a twin-turbocharged V12 that delivers vastly increased power and even greater smoothness than the CL550. The CL600 produces 510 horsepower and 612 pound-feet of torque, an astounding 56 percent increase over the CL550. The V12 is so smooth and quiet in stop-and-go traffic it almost feels like the car is powered by an electric motor. Yet awe-inspiring acceleration is just a push of the pedal away: Mercedes quotes a 0-60 time of 4.5 seconds for the CL600, smack in the middle of the range for Corvettes, Porsches, and Ferraris. There's so much low-end power on tap that the tires would spin wildly if not for the traction and stability control systems working overtime. Highway acceleration feels like a DVD on fast-forward. We don't know why anyone would actually need this much power in a CL, but it is amazing to experience it. Nearly all of what we reported on the CL550 and its multitudinous systems is true of the CL600, which includes virtually all of them as standard.

The CL63 comes with a 6.3-liter V8 that produces 518 horsepower at 6800 rpm and 465 pound-feet of torque at 5200. This is not simply a larger version of the CL550 engine, but a unique unit sharing no parts with any other Mercedes-Benz V8. Like the CL550 engine, it features four valves per cylinder, variable valve timing, and a variable intake manifold; but its higher-rpm valve system relies on bucket tappets rather than the finger type. Mercedes says to expect 0-60 times of 4.5 seconds. The CL63 is sportier and louder than the CL65.

The CL65 is powered by a 6.0-liter twin-turbocharged and intercooled V12 that produces 604 horsepower and 738 pound-feet of torque, for a claimed rocket ride from 0-60 mph in just 4.2 seconds. Both of the AMG models are electronically limited to 155 mph, compared to 130 for the CL550 4MATIC and CL600.

The AMG models use the same active suspension as the other CLs, but it's tuned for flatter cornering and tighter control of body motion, and stability and traction-control functions are upgraded for the additional power. A button on the center console allows the driver to choose among three different shift programs, Sport, Comfort, or Manual, that fine-tune accelerator pedal response and spring and shock absorber settings.

The AMG models also feature large composite brake discs (15.4-inch diameter in front, 14.4-inch in the rear), to slow them in a hurry, converting all that speed to heat in mere moments. The front discs are not only vented by cross-drilled. Twin sliding calipers on the front brakes combine the performance of a large fixed caliper with the reduced heat transfer of a floating caliper. Providing room for those big binders are 20-inch alloy wheels, 8.5 inches wide in front and 9.5 inches at the rear, wearing low-profile 255/35 front and 275/35 rear tires. Mercedes claims the CL65 can stop from 60 mph in just 116 feet.

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