One of the cars I am most eagerly anticipating is the 2019 Mercedes-AMG A 35. It’ll be the mid-range A-Class AMG to slot below the A 45. It will probably have about 300 horsepower. And just look at it go on the Nürburgring!

Power will likely come from a 2.0-liter turbocharged four-cylinder. It certainly sounds like a four-cylinder under the hood of the test mule, but angrier and buzzier than most typical four-bangers. It definitely has a dual-clutch transmission, too. Listen to how quickly those shifts happen.

Mercedes still hasn’t confirmed whether or not that AMGified A-Class cars will come to the United States, but God I hope they do. Give me all of the hot German hatches.

With a drag coefficient of 0.22, the A-Class cheats the wind nicely

When it comes to drag coefficients, what's the slipperiest production car you can buy new in 2019? If you guessed the new Mercedes-Benz A-Class sedan, you got it right. The sedan, slated for production in late 2018, will have the Cd value of just 0.22.

The drag coefficient of the Mercedes is seriously low, and it matches the 2013-on CLA's value. For production cars, the 1935 Tatra T77A slid under that with a 0.212 and the General Motors EV1 and the Volkswagen XL1 undercut that with a 0.19, but like the Tatra, you'd be hard pressed to see those on the road today. The EfficientDynamics edition of the 2017 BMW 520d also has a drag coefficient of 0.22, but in that guise it's European market only model, and the A-Class Sedan will come to the United States when it starts rolling out of the Aguascalientes assembly in Mexico. As for Teslas, the Model 3 is marked down as having a Cdvalue of 0.23, and the Model S gets a 0.24.

In the other end of the scale, just to put things in proportion, you have the Mercedes G-Class with a Cd of 0.54 and the Hummer H2 with a 0.57. And even if you thought the original Viper looked slippery, it's not: the RT-10 has do with a 0.45, while something as blocky-looking as a Volvo 740 Sedan undercuts that handsomely with a 0.41.

Mercedes says the A-Class's aerodynamics were managed by minimizing the car's frontal area on the drawing board, developing sealing further to include even the headlamp surroundings, and paneling nearly the entire underbody, including the engine bay and rear axle. There's also an optional shutter system for the radiator grille on some markets, to further reroute airflow.

We got a peek at the 2019 Mercedes A-Class in hatchback form earlier this year, but the U.S. market car will be sedan only. I’m still excited about it, because based on this batch of photos, it seems like a damn fine-looking little car.

It’s a reserved design, but it’s sharp and clean. I think a set of retro monoblock wheels would look cooler than the split five-spokes we see here, but I suppose I’ll wait to find out how good the thing is to drive before I start fantasizing about modifications.

Our man Justin Westbrook is at the A-Class launch event in New York as I write this, so I’m sure he’ll have some first-person perspective for you soon. But for now, we can just enjoy the company’s media album from this Mercedes press release.

The American market A-Class range will include the A220 and a A220 4MATIC, both of which will run a 2.0-liter inline four-cylinder turbocharged engine rated to a modest 188 horsepower and 221 lb-ft of torque. A seven-speed dual-clutch automatic will be the only transmission option.

That’s not a whole lot of get up and go, but the four-banger doesn’t have too much car to move, either. Mercedes says that the 2019 A-Class is 179.1 inches long with a 107.4-inch wheelbase, 70.7 inches wide and 56.9 inches tall.


The CLA, Merc’s most diminutive sedan in the U.S. until today, is just a hair bigger at 182.3 inches long.

Pricing hasn’t been confirmed yet, and I don’t see a hit-dealerships date either, but I’d expect this vehicle to cost a little less than a comparably equipped CLA, which starts at about $33,000 these days. It doesn’t look like the U.S. will get an A-Class that’s quite as lean as the base model in Europe, but this will now effectively be the cheapest route to brand new Mercedes ownership.

Based on pictures of the A-Class alone, I love it. Here’s hoping it drives as well as it looks and that there’s a V8 AMG version on the horizon. I mean, it’d probably be a V6 if anything, but a boy can dream.

Apparently more details on the 2019 A-Class will be announced at the Paris Motor Show in October.

Mercedes-Benz seems to be replacing the saggy CLA model in the U.S. with the first-ever American market Mercedes-Benz A-Class. It looks great, it’s the first to feature some of the automaker’s newest tech and styling, and I had about five minutes on a hotel rooftop last night to check it out. Here’s what I know.

1. Mercedes-Benz’s new double-wide screen infotainment setup is a big improvement.

Gone are the days of the floating screen seemingly tacked onto an air vent. Mercedes has already premiered its new super-wide information screen, which stretches from the driver’s information all the way across the dashboard. The A-Class is the first Mercedes model to get an upgraded infotainment setup paired with the new screen, though, as well as a new touchpad that’s much more intuitive than the old wheel dial control.

People use laptops all of the time. How often do you use a little bezeled wheel to do anything beyond turn on the shower water? It’s a nice upgrade, and it’s even nicer that it’s in the entry-level car.

2. With the new screen and touchpad, there’s also a new virtual assistant that answers to voice commands.

You wake the assistant up by saying, “Hey, Mercedes?” and an elegant British woman’s voice would inquire what it could do for you, which is interesting for a German automaker. However, since the programming seemingly wasn’t actually setup, demands for the nearest McDonalds, pizza, and requests to change climate settings fell to silent virtual ears.

Still, should it work on the production car, it’s a neat feature that may actually get some use as long as you don’t bring up the word “Mercedes” frequently in casual conversation inside the car.

3. The A-Class doesn’t pretend it’s a coupe, which means the back seats are actually comfortable.

The CLA’s identity crisis as a four-door coupe, and its placement in the small car segment meant that the back seat was tighter than it had any reason to be. Since the new A-Class is more of a “traditional” sedan with a roof that accounts for human heads, it’s much nicer in the back.

Leg room is pretty good for a car of this size, with a guy over six foot able to sit just barely without rubbing if the seat in front was setup for his driving position. Some gouging of mass in the back of the front seats helps with this, and the glass roof stops short enough to lend a few more inches of head room.

4. Entry level still means there was a limit on the budget, and it clearly ends below the waist.

The interior of the new A-Class is a pleasant-enough place to be, visually and aesthetically. Mercedes’ obsession with that weird mood lighting continues as a standard feature on the A, but the soft materials and fancy finishes end right about waist level.

Most of the footwell furnishings, like the lower door panel, glove box door, and center console panel are brittle to touch. The seats are also all manually adjustable, but this could be remedied with an option in the future, we’ll see. It’s not a big deal, but it’s also a big clue as to where in the lineup you’re sitting. At the very least, some softer knee-contact patches would be very welcome for those of us that don’t always stretch out, or for dealing with an aggressive driver.

5. If you can remove a line and it still looks good, remove another line.

That was the design philosophy behind the new A-Class, according to the reveal presentation. Mercedes is moving away from the days of unnecessary folds and creases in the design language. Supposedly, this is the direction we’re going to see the automaker continue down in the future, with smoother, simpler bodywork. Do you like it?

Bonus: Are the wheels bronze, copper, gold, or rose gold?

The majority of my discussion of the A-Class last night, both in person and on Twitter, was sparked when the color of the wheel accent hue was questioned.

In the reveal video, and on the car on display last night, the shadow areas of the wheel design were colored. A debate followed about what color it was. Daniel Golson of Car And Driver questioned if it was rose gold, because he seems to like that sort of thing. What followed tested even the strongest of friendships. Ultimately, I settled it with a handy phone camera feature called flash (the drink, and the hand holding it, is not mine).

At least, we figured out it’s definitely not rose gold. Could we have asked somebody from Mercedes? Sure. Is it somewhere in a press release? Maybe. Were we all journalists meant to be seriously covering a car reveal? Of course. Did any of us actually want to bother ruining a perfectly good argument with facts? Absolutely not.

If you want to know more about the new A-Class, check out our post from last night. It seems like a promising little rival to the Audi A3, and I could see it selling very, very well.

Mercedes-AMG has released a set of teaser photos for its new mid-level hot hatch, the A35. Powered by an extensive redevelopment of the same 2.0-litre turbocharged four-pot you’ll find within the regular A-Class, its mission is to take the fight directly to the Volkswagen Golf R.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the likes of the A45 and Audi RS 3 were getting a little beyond the sweet spot for a hot hatch. Sitting below the A45 but above the A250, which some will say isn’t hot enough, the A35 is right on the money for a modern fast hatch.

Because it retains four-wheel drive this happy middle-ground machine should slap down a 0-62mph sprint in around 4.5 seconds, leaving the A45 to drop below the four-second mark. There won’t be much to set the two true AMG cars apart at the kerbside, but the A35 will get a twin-exhaust arrangement versus the A45’s four.

Adaptive damping that uses less extreme settings is one possibility for the A35’s bouncy bits, but a passive setup would be cheaper and help the car dip down to the £35,000-ish starting price point Mercedes is aiming at.

Power will beat the car’s main competitors, according to reports, which puts the target number north of 300bhp. The Golf R currently sits at 296bhp after it lost 10bhp in an emissions-related reshuffle. AMG wants the A35 to be faster to 62mph and 124mph than the Volkswagen Group rivals, too.

The car is due to arrive in the middle of 2019. We wonder what VW and Audi are cooking up in response…

We found it pretty hard not to like the new 2019 Mercedes-Benz A-Class, a sleek sedan and hatchback combo that seemed to really up its game over the current family of Mercedes compacts. But everyone had one question: where’s the AMG version? Apparently, this is it.

Meet the 2019 Mercedes-AMG A35 hatchback, which is set to debut in a few weeks at the Paris Motor Show but leaked early, as these things do, onto Australian car website Redline. It’s not confirmed that this is the officially official new AMG hatch, but those pics—complete with engine bay shots—sure look legit.

According to Redline, the littlest AMG gets a 2.0-liter turbocharged four-cylinder putting out a Golf R-fighting 300 horsepower. Later a much hotter 400 HP version is expected, the site says, which would top the power on the current A45 and its platform siblings the CLA45 and GLA45.

As with the current compact AMGs, power goes to all four wheels through a seven-speed dual clutch gearbox, and the new A35 AMG is expected to do zero to 60 in just 4.7 seconds. So even if you don’t opt for the upcoming hotter version, you’ll be plenty fast.

There’s a raft of interior enhancements over the standard car too, including AMG sport seats, a leather and microfiber AMG steering wheel and metallic paddle shifters.

Sadly we know the A-Class hatch won’t come to the U.S. But the A-Class sedan is coming here for the first time ever, and it will spawn a new somehow-different CLA and a money-printing GLA crossover. I’d be willing to guess some of those, if not all, will get AMG variants down the line.

In the meantime, this looks like a fun addition to the hot hatch world if you can get your hands on it. Expect more when the car drops for real in Paris.

We all know it’s impossible to legally use a supercar's full performance on public roads, but hey, you're still in a supercar. Hot hatchbacks are proving what supercars can’t: that excess power isn’t always a good thing

Hot hatchbacks have been gaining power with indecent speed. It was only the middle of the last decade that 200bhp was about as much as you could cram into a practical, five-door hatchback without making the chassis look silly. Not any more.

Since then plenty of manufacturers have upped the hot hatch ante. First, power nudged 250bhp. Then it was 300bhp after four-wheel drive joined the party. Now we’re looking at 400bhp mega-hatches like they’re nothing unusual. That really is crazy: hot hatch power output doubled in just 12 years.

The next Mercedes-AMG A45 has been in the news this week, albeit indirectly within the AMG A35 teaser and subsequent full reveal. Mercedes’ decision to push the A45 right to the mental end of the market to make room for the saner and surely more usable A35 got us thinking. If we had, say, £35,000, which is the rumoured target starting price for the lesser of the two AMG A brothers, would we wait for a lightly used A45, with something like 400bhp and stiffer suspension, or would be rather tread a little lighter with the 300bhp-ish A35?

The answer in the CT office was pretty one-sided, which is to say ‘other Matt’ and I had a conflab and agreed the A35 sounds like the sweeter buy. Our reasoning went something like this. As impressed as we were by the 395bhp Audi RS3’s utter demolition of its rivals – including the outgoing A45 – in most drag races, our experiences with the bombastic Hyundai i30 N suggest that, in the real world, less power can be more fun.

Anyone who’s ever thrashed the last breath out of a 50-something horsepower supermini knows how much silly, low-speed fun it can be. Maximising what the car can do without stepping over the limit either into a hedge or a courtroom is no bad thing. We’re talking about the same principle with hot hatchbacks, but there’s more to it.

The Seat Leon Cupra 280/290/300/New 290 is an absolute belter. It has enough power to trouble the front wheels and keep things interesting, enough explosive torque to make the manual version feel like a neutron bomb in your pants and enough traction to tear its own tyres to shreds in days if you’re really going at it.

With the A45, Mercedes-AMG is said to be tuning it to be almost track-spec firm, with the A35’s damping backed off for more compliance. It sounds to us like the A35, with its more usable output, AMG character and road-tuned springy bits, might be the one to have.

Not that this makes the A45 irrelevant or undesirable. Who doesn’t enjoy activating Launch Control and feeling their internal organs turn two-dimensional? We just have a sneaking suspicion that the A35 will be more fun, more of the time. And for us, it raises a question mark over the whole hot hatch power war.

"Hey Mercedes."

"How old is Maury Povich?"

The automaker's MBUX
infotainment system which makes its debut in the A-Class thinks for a few moments and then informs me that the day-time talk show host and collector of human DNA is 79 years old. It's a silly joke, yet it shows that Mercedes-Benz is investing in one of the more important features of new cars: How we interact with them.

With MBUX, drivers and passengers aren't limited to random questions, they can also control aspects of the vehicle, including navigation and climate controls. All of this happens with natural language. No scripts and no need to push a button. Just say the wake words, "Hi Mercedes" or "Hey Mercedes"

Between random commands and questions, I was able to adjust the climate control of myself and the passenger. I could turn on and off the heated seats of both. I also found four-star or greater Mexican restaurants in the Seattle area and figured out how far San Francisco was (and the height of Mt. Whitney).

I was also able to find locations, start navigation and add waypoints with a Starbucks (which was closed for construction, booo) along my route all without taking my hands off the steering wheel. As more and more systems require us to take our eyes off the task at hand to do simple tasks, it's important to find ways to focus on the road. MBUX does this. But it's not completely without issues.

If MBUX can't answer a query or complete a task, it doesn't inform you of this limitation. It just keeps asking what it can help you with. So you never know if you're asking the question wrong or if your not in an area with strong enough signal for questions that require the cloud. Also, you can't use it to do tasks like adjust the volume and turn the lights on/off. Mostly for the sake of safety.

For folks that don't want to talk to their car, you can reply via the touchpad which Mercedes has used for years (or via the new touchscreen). These are both connected to a new UI that surfaces most of the major items we care about (navigation, media, radio, phone, settings) to the top. It also uses AI to learn about your behavior and creates favorites for things like the person you call the most or the location you navigate to on a regular basis.

One of my favorite new features is the AR that puts directions and street names over a real-world view of your route at low speeds. The map on the center display is replaced by a view of the world in front of the car and blue arrows point you in the right direction.

Oh, and it's very fast with very little latency thanks to the automaker using the latest Nvidia hardware.

The A-Class sedan that wraps around MBUX should do very well once it hits US shores. Its aggressive low stance gives it the air of a luxury German sport sedan far more expensive than something that starts in the low-to-mid $30,000 range (Mercedes should have final pricing details available in a few months).

This is the first A-Class to make it to the United States and while we sadly won't be getting the amazing looking hatchback that's available in Europe, the sedan should turn heads and open up wallets here.

The A-Class A220 has a 2.0 liter 4-cylinder turbocharged engine that puts out 188 horsepower and 221 foot-pounds of torque. It's not exactly ready to race the rest of the Mercedes line up, but around town that powerplant should keep folks more than happy.

It's available with FWD (front-wheel-drive) or Mercedes' AWD (all-wheel-drive) 4Matic system. After driving both, I'd go for the 4Matic. But if you don't plan on hitting switchbacks anytime soon, the FWD version should suffice around town and in the highway. Although the 4Matic version did seem to have a bit of a harsher ride over rough roads. Because the cars are preproduction I'm not sure if that's a bug or a feature for better handling.

Along with MBUX, the A-Class supports all the fancy new driver assistance features found in the S-Class. So in addition to adaptive cruise control and lane keep assist, the A-Class outfitted with the Driver Assistance Package will also get route based speed adaptation (the car will slow down at corners on its own while in cruise control) and can change lanes by itself. All that for probably $2,250 more.

The interior is typical Mercedes: comfort mixed with luxury. If you opt for the 64-color ambient lighting system, it's a bit like being in a Virgin America cabin. Throw in the large propeller-esque vents and the A-Class seems like the car a young Howard Hughes would have enjoyed driving around in between plane crashes.

Young is what Mercedes is going for with the A-Class. It's a fun compact Mercedes that's packed with technology and has a starting price that should lure folks with a bit of cash (and a desire to step up their car into the showroom). The vehicle will be available in early 2019 and once we get our hands on a production vehicle, we'll have a full review.

A few months out from the debut of the all-new A-Class hatchback, Mercedes-Benz pulled the sheet off its first hot iteration: The AMG A35. Its online debut was about two weeks ahead of its in-person debut at the Paris Motor Show – but now we finally get to see the hot hatch for the first time in the sheet metal.

Of course, this feisty five-door looks substantially more aggressive than the standard A-Class. Some of the dead design giveaways include the aggressive front fascia with splitters aplenty, the blacked-out, high-spoke wheels, dat massive wing out back, and the bold blue paint job with grey accents, a sharp contrast from the yellow debut photos.

But the new A35 isn't just a looker – it's more powerful, too.

The hot hatch comes powered by a turbocharged 2.0-liter engine producing 302 horsepower (225 kilowatts) and 295 pound-feet (400 Newton-meters). Power funnels to all four wheels courtesy of a seven-speed, dual-clutch automatic transmission. Flat out, the A35 will sprint to 62 miles per hour (100 kilometers per hour) 4.7 seconds, and on to a top speed of 155 mph (250 kmh).

Inside, the A35 features all the same tech you'll find on the standard A-Class. In particular, the new MBUX infotainment system surrounds the driver, replacing the previous COMAND setup. The A35 also gets a number of unique drive modes, including "Comfort," "Sport," "Sport+," "Individual," and even, "Slippery" for slipperier surfaces.

The new Mercedes-AMG A35 still doesn't have a price, but it should go on sale in Western Europe as early as January 2019 – and no, it won't come to the U.S. The hot hatch is currently on display at the Paris Motor Show.