- Mercedes-Benz made a curious decision with the new CLA EV.
- The sleek sedan can only use 800-volt fast chargers.
- Despite it coming with a Tesla-designed NACS charging port in the U.S., the CLA won’t be able to use any Superchargers.
The new electric Mercedes-Benz CLA is touted as the next best thing in the EV game. It’s massively efficient and can charge at up to 320 kilowatts thanks to its 800-volt architecture. You can think of it as a smaller, more affordable Lucid Air.
However, unlike the Air, the new CLA comes with a big charging caveat. It can’t use 400V DC chargers.
It all started with a tweet from an EV enthusiast from Norway known as RomingNorway on social media. He posted a screenshot of a section on Mercedes-Benz’s website that said the new CLA can only use 800V DC fast chargers and that the car’s built-in navigation system will only route drivers to compatible stations.
That doesn’t sound like a big deal at first. To take advantage of the lightning-fast charging speeds that the CLA touts, it needs a stall that can deliver 800V. The problem? Most fast chargers in the United States can’t deliver that voltage and are limited to roughly 400V. As a result, the new CLA will be limited to a handful of DC fast chargers, which negates all the technological advancements baked into it.
You can have the fastest-charging EV in the world, but its utility is severely limited if you can’t charge it anywhere. Road trips, at least for now, are out of the question.
This seemed like a mistake, so I got in touch with several people at Mercedes-Benz, both in the United States and in Europe. But it’s true: the new CLA EV can’t use 400V DC chargers and can only be recharged at 800V stalls. That said, its ability to charge at home from an AC source is not affected by this rather surprising choice.
“The CLA can’t use 400V DC chargers,” a European Mercedes-Benz spokesperson told InsideEVs over email. “We consciously rely exclusively on pure 800-volt charging technology, where we do not have to make any compromises in charging performance.”
A Mercedes-Benz USA spokesperson added: “While it is not possible to charge at 400V DC charging stations, the Mercedes-Benz navigation with Electric Intelligence leads to the compatible high-performance chargers, where charging with up to 320kW is possible with the new CLA.”
That’s all well and good, but the fact of the matter is that the new CLA will come to the U.S. with a Tesla-designed NACS charging port that’s essentially useless. The Supercharger network is the largest in the country, but none can deliver 800V in the U.S. This means that owners will need a CCS1 charging adapter to get juice from 800V stations that aren’t Superchargers and typically only offer CCS1 plugs.
The spokesperson added that this cannot be fixed via a software update, as it is a hardware challenge.
EV charging in America is getting faster and faster; Electrify America’s network, for example, is entirely 1,000V already. But this decision will limit where the new CLA can fast-charge in various situations, which will feel like a downgrade to the ownership experience.
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Source: Andrei Nedelea
Mercedes-Benz fitted two charging ports under the same flap—a NACS inlet and a J1772 port for AC charging. That’s a thoughtful design, but for whatever reason, the NACS port, which supports AC charging natively, can’t accept AC on the CLA, making tens of thousands of Tesla Destination Chargers unusable. Instead, American owners will have to rely on J1772 chargers to get their slow charge.
The German automaker is betting it all on charging providers ramping up the deployment of 800V stalls, which has already started happening. Cars like the Lucid Air, Lucid Gravity, Porsche Taycan, Hyundai Ioniq 5, and Kia EV9 all use 800V and higher architectures to boost the charging speeds, so charging companies are catching up to cater to the growing number of EVs that can accept higher voltages.
However, all these other cars can also use older 400V stalls. The charging speeds decrease dramatically compared to using an 800V charger, but it’s still possible to get back on the road in a pinch. In the CLA EV, not so much.
