The Mercedes CLA Charged at 349 kW in a Test. Mercedes Only Promises 320.

Cars usually undershoot their charging claims. The Mercedes CLA overshot one and missed the other, and the gap between those two results is the most useful thing in the test.

Tom Moloughney's charging run for InsideEVs, published on 16 September 2026, used a CLA 350 4MATIC — the all-wheel-drive version, carrying the same 85 kWh usable pack as the rear-drive CLA 250+ sold in Europe.

What the test recorded

The car reached its peak in under a minute, passed 25% in about five and a half minutes, and had recovered half its battery in roughly 15 minutes. Moloughney places it inside the five quickest-charging cars he has tested, without calling it the best.

Peak power is the number that sells; average power is the number that drives

A 349 kW spike is a headline. It is also held for a short part of the session, which is why a car that beats its claimed peak by 29 kW can still take four minutes longer than promised over 10-80%.

The figure that decides a journey is the 193 kW average, because that is the rate that actually moves energy while you wait. On that measure the CLA is genuinely quick rather than remarkable, and the front-loaded shape of its curve rewards short, early top-ups far more than it rewards charging to 80%.

Where a Tesla sits in this

The Model 3 Long Range peaks at 250 kW on a roughly 400-volt pack. The CLA's 800-volt architecture is what lets it draw around 350 kW at all — the higher voltage moves the same power at lower current, which is the constraint a 400-volt car runs into.

That is a real engineering advantage and it is worth being precise about its size. Tesla does not publish a 10-80% time for the Model 3, so the honest comparison stops at the peak, and peaks are the part of a charging curve that flatters a car most. What the CLA demonstrably has is headroom; how much of the journey that converts into is a narrower question than a 350 kW number suggests.

The European catch is the charger, not the car

An 800-volt car only collects its advantage from a charger that can deliver it, and most European CCS sites are rated 150 to 350 kW with real-world output well below the label at a busy site.

Continental capacity is climbing — a Slovak operator pushed 918 kW into a passenger car at a motorway test site this month — but the deciding factor for a CLA owner is how many 350 kW stalls sit on their actual route, and what they cost. On the second point the CLA has no Supercharger-style single network behind it, and European fast-charging prices still vary by more than a third between neighbouring countries, as the Ionity gap between Italy and France showed.

For a European buyer cross-shopping a Model 3, that is the trade in one line: the Mercedes charges faster when the hardware allows it, and the Tesla charges more predictably because Tesla owns the hardware.