The Mercedes-Benz CLS Is Reportedly Dying. It Changed The Way We Look At Sedans

If you want a Mercedes-Benz CLS, you better hurry up. A Mercedes representative has confirmed to the Australian outlet CarExpert that production will end this August. It’s not unexpected given Mercedes’ prior announcement of model streamlining, but it still makes me sad. While the current CLS is a perfectly fine motor vehicle, the original CLS was revolutionary. From the Lucid Air to the Hyundai Elantra, a huge number of modern sedans owe a certain debt to the first CLS.

Back in the mid-2000s, Mercedes entered the then-crowded (different times!) luxury sedan market with something truly unique. With its banana-like silhouette accented by a single curved character line running from the front wheel arch through the tail light, the CLS looked like no other sedan on the road. It was Vice to the E-Class’ Deutsche Welle, a switchblade in a world of table knives. In terms of the lineup, it was a very nice car, too; pricing-wise, it slotted in between the E-Class and the range-topper S-Class.

As Car And Driver reported at the time, the design drew its fair share of adoration and ire.

For instance, a woman at a gas station remarked, “Your car has a droopy butt.” How’s that? Was she blind in one eye and unable to see out of the other? A man at a fancy mall told us, “I’ve never seen a Mercedes that wild. I don’t know, it’s pretty extreme.” Is the CLS, for a Benz, too radical? Naw. Like the guy scoffing at the swimsuit babe, some people are just wrong. The CLS is gorgeous. End of story.

Initial divisiveness aside, the original CLS is striking and one of the more successful low-slung sedans of recent history. In the wake of ever-more-vulgar styling, it’s now this bastion of gorgeous simplicity, and its substance can still cash all the checks its curvaceous sheetmetal writes.

On the inside, the E-Class’ business-like dashboard got nixed for a new one featuring one giant horizontal slab of matte wood, and the center rear seat was replaced with a luxurious console. While you don’t see many modern cars with climate controls sitting above the infotainment, the interior materials of the CLS feel a decade advanced, as every premium automaker under the sun seems to offer some sort of satin wood option.

As far as mechanicals go, they’ve also held up well. The M113 5.0-liter V8 on the CLS 500 is a tank, offering unwavering reliability and decent punch. It’s mated to a seven-speed automatic gearbox that still feels reasonably modern, even if it’s on the slow side by today’s standards.

Regarding ride and handling, adaptive damping came standard on CLS 500s, and the chassis feels a bit more eager than on an E-Class. Most of the credit for that goes towards a different wheel and tire package that reduces understeer, but that decision makes for a sharper Mercedes that doesn’t sacrifice ride quality.

Several years after the launch of the CLS, BMW and Audi showed off concept cars of a similar form, while Volkswagen took the four-door coupe trend downmarket with the Passat CC. The brief was simple: A midsize sedan, but sexier. The B6 Passat was already a nice vehicle with punchy turbocharged or seductive VR6 power, lovely interior appointments, and thoughtful touches like umbrella compartments, but the CC took things to another level with sleek styling and an available set of delectable turbine wheels.

If the Passat CC brought the four-door coupe to a more affordable segment, things really kicked off when Hyundai unveiled the 2011 Sonata. It was quite the power move for Hyundai in the decade when that company really came into its own, a stunning replacement for one of the most generic-looking sedans on sale.

Carrying the chassis code YF, the sixth-generation Sonata has a mixed legacy thanks to widespread reports of engine failure. What wasn’t so mixed was the reception to this thing’s sloping roofline and curvaceous styling. Automobile Magazine heaped such praise on the Sonata as “The graceful sculpture of the rearview mirror is worthy of Constantin Brâncuşi at his best. Very nice indeed.” Car And Driver went even further and put the Sonata on its 2011 10Best list, writing that this Hyundai was “best-in-class attractive” and that “No longer simply great for the money, this latest Sonata propels Hyundai to 10Best glory for the first time because its greatness is undeniable.” Kia then followed Hyundai’s lead with the Optima platform-mate, and the swoopy sedan trend stuck.

For the difficult second act, I don’t think Mercedes quite nailed it. The second-generation CLS was more luxurious than before, but also less beautiful. Slab-sided haunches and a character line running from the front lamps to the rear doors gave it a sort of Buick-like sweepspear while making the amount of metal on the bodyside seem huge. It’s still a sharp-looking car, but it’s not razor wire like the original.

However, the second-generation CLS did give us one of the more tantalizing Euro-only Benzes of the 21st century: The CLS 63 Shooting Brake.

The long greenhouse of the shooting brake did wonders for the CLS, and a 500-plus horsepower wagon is just plain cool by any measure. However, now the competition started to catch up. The first-generation Audi A7 is still gorgeous and the BMW 6 Series Gran Coupe might just be the last truly pretty BMW.

When the third-generation CLS launched, the sleekness of the original was back. Mercedes took the time to reduce hard character lines, and I reckon it worked. While I appreciate the effort of cutting visual weight, some of the verve that made the previous models special was missing. The dashboard was no different than on a standard E-Class and the largest engine option was a turbocharged inline-six.

It was great for most people’s needs, but the CLS was never about needs. It was about wants, and what many CLS customers wanted was a thumping V8 nestled inside sexier coachwork than an E-Class has to offer. We never did get a V8-powered third-generation CLS, but it didn’t take long to figure out why: Mercedes had effectively replaced by a car with an enormous name, The Mercedes-AMG GT 63 S 4-Door Coupe.

Eventually, the Mercedes-AMG GT 4-Door Coupe started trickling down into the realm of the CLS, starting with the six-cylinder GT 53 4-Door Coupe and more recently expanding to the low-output GT 43 4-Door Coupe. If this sounds like cannibalization, you’d be right, and it’s for one of the oldest reasons in the book: Money. Even with largely identical inline-six powertrains, every Mercedes-AMG GT 53 4-Door is a six-figure car, while lightly-equipped CLS 53s weren’t. Car companies are in the business of making money, so if they can charge a higher price for conceptually-similar products, you best believe they will.

With Mercedes looking to kill off low-volume models, the writing for the CLS has been on the wall for a long time. However, its influence is hard to understate. Nowadays, a huge number of mainstream and luxury sedans don’t feature a traditional three-box silhouette. From the Honda Civic to the Lucid Air, the break between window and deck has grown harder and harder to discern, and there’s a good reason for this other than the obvious style benefits. An abrupt transition from roof to rear window like you’d see on a traditional sedan promotes an area of low pressure above the trunklid. As a gross oversimplification, this is generally considered bad as it can increase drag.

What’s more, these fast silhouettes show that sometimes there’s nothing wrong with sacrificing a bit of practicality for style. So what if rear-seat ingress and egress aren’t as easy as they could be? Most cars are primarily occupied by a single person, and swooping rooflines can look great. A really good four-door coupe makes its owner smile when they look at it, and that’s really what we all want out of our cars.

(Photo credits: Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Hyundai, Honda, Lucid)

Support our mission of championing car culture by becoming an Official Autopian Member.

• Mercedes-Benz Is Reportedly Killing Off Most Of Its Wagons And Coupes

• This Newspaper Clipping About Houdini Proves The ‘Four-Door Coupe’ Is Nearly 100 Years Old

• Here’s Why The Forgotten Mercedes-Benz Sports Cars Of The 20th Century Are Worth Remembering

• Watch The Mercedes-AMG One Smash The Nürburgring Lap Record Under Apparently Seriously Sub-Optimal Conditions

• Someone Snuck A Canadian Mercedes-AMG A35 Hatchback Across The Border And It’s Now For Sale In America

Got a hot tip? Send it to us here. Or check out the stories on our homepage.