Published:
21 April 2012Given its generous length it’s hardly surprising to find that the Mercedes CL's interior is a spacious one. Inside the CL, there’s very little that isn’t S-Class derived. The rear seats aren’t, obviously, but although they’re nowhere near as capacious as the saloon’s, there is room for two large adults. The boot is only marginally smaller than the S-Class’s (at 490 rather than 560 litres) and is well shaped: long, wide and deep.
In the front of the cabin, though, you’d be pushed to tell the S and CL apart, which, given the saloon’s standard of fit and finish, is mostly a good thing. Mercedes is slowly repairing its tattered reputation for making bombproof interiors, and the CL will do its cause no harm at all. Hard plastics are difficult to find, but there are some foibles: the cover on the phone controller’s pad hinges the wrong way for a right-hooker, the row of silvery switches on the dash is on the vulgar side, and some of the stitching could be more precise.
But the biggest problem inside this car is a lack of visual flair. There is plenty that’s well assembled, but the seat adjustment switches on the doors are a little clumsy and there’s too little in the way of fine detailing. To put it bluntly, a Continental GT feels a lot more special. This is less of an issue in a saloon, but in an £90,000 coupé the subjective is at least as important as the objective, and here the CL falls rather short. That’s even more apparent in the AMG models, with buyers dropping north of £160,000 on the range-topping CL 65 AMG certain to feel rather short changed despite the addition of some AMG glitter inside.
