New Mercedes CL-Class goes on sale today

Combining the technology, quality and comfort of the highly rated Mercedes S-Class with a muscular and elegant two-door coupe, the new CL-Class goes on sale in the UK from today, 1 March.

Models available from launch are the CL 500 priced at £79,550, the CL 600 costing £106,995 and the CL 63 AMG at £103,450. The prices represent a 7% increase over the outgoing models, but say Mercedes, they benefit from 15% added value in the form of more space, more power and more safe driving technology.

A comprehensive extra cost options list including some safer driving systems such as Pre-Safe Braking will add considerably to those prices for CL 500 and CL 600 variants.

If history repeats itself Mercedes-Benz in the UK estimates that around 700 CL-Class coupes will be sold in this country in its launch year with 70% of customers choosing the CL 500 derivative. Mercedes estimate around 20% of customers will opt for the AMG variant.

Unlike some of its competitors no four-wheel drive variant is available for the UK due to the right hand drive configuration although left hand drive markets will have the option of 4-Matic models.

Claire McDonnell, Product Executive for CL-Class said this week at the UK media launch, that for the previous CL-Class launched in 2002 retail customers accounted for 80% of sales and she expects 50% of customers for the new models will be existing Mercedes owners and nearly half of those will be previous CL-Class customers.

She added that 93% of previous CL-Class customers are male against 76% for the average Mercedes-Benz customer. They are generally company owners and directors with an average age of 54 years and with average annual earnings of nearly £88k.

The Previous CL-Class was the best selling luxury coupe ever in the industry with over 47,0000 sales worldwide. In the UK luxury sector the main sellers are the CL-Class, the Porsche 911, Bentley Continental GT, Jaguar XK series, Aston Martin DB9 and the Maserati Coupe. These models accumulated just under 3000 UK sales in 2000 rising to just over 6000 in 2005 before falling slightly to just over 5000 vehicles in 2006.