The baby Benz has grown up—the 2020 Mercedes-Benz CLA, reviewed

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  Mercedes-Benz evidently visited Washington DC at some point because this 2020 CLA 250 is driving along the Whitehurst Freeway in Georgetown.

Over 35 years ago, it irked a number of Mercedes executives and insiders when people referred to the then-new 190E sedan as the "baby Benz." Full disclosure, I worked at the company in the early 2000s and even by then, there were still people at headquarters who scrunched their noses and furrowed their brows at the term.

Yet now, we're well into another era of baby Benzes. Not only is there currently a second-generation of the CLA, there's also the even smaller A-Class. Both are compact and front-drive-oriented small sedans that borrow much of their form factors from the larger CLS, itself a design hit. Yet, the CLA wears the silly "four-door coupe" descriptor Mercedes gives it and others, while the A-class-which is clearly cut from the same design cloth-is classified as a sedan and not a "coupe."

For 2020, the CLA comes in three main flavors

The new CLA is larger in nearly every way than the previous generation, which helps it distance itself from the even smaller A-class sedan, though it shares a platform with the junior Mercedes. The CLA is actually 5.5 inches longer than the A-class and starts at $37,645, including destination, almost $4,000 more expensive.

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