Mercedes-Benz A-Class A250e review

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Plug-in A-Class broadens Mercedes’ extensive hybrid line-up, but will it top the class?

Richard Lane
by Richard Lane
14 August 2020

Really rather quietly, Mercedes-Benz has gone and secured itself quite a significant advantage over and above its rivals.

This has to do with the number of plug-in hybrid (PHEV) models that currently populate the Mercedes catalogue. Whereas BMW and Audi have just four model lines that combine combustion engines with plug sockets and electric motors, Mercedes now has twice that figure – more if you account for the fact that Mercedes is the only one of the three brands that makes both diesel and petrol-powered PHEVs.

Classic five-spoke 18in alloy wheels come as standard on all A250e models. There isn’t an option to change the wheel design or fit larger ones.
Richard Lane
Deputy road test editor

The subject of this week’s road test is the latest, and arguably most important, addition to what Mercedes now refers to as its EQ Power family of electrified vehicles. The A250e hatchback joins that group alongside its A250e saloon sibling and the new B250e compact MPV, bringing the price the average buyer will have to pay for an electrified Mercedes down to just under £33,000 in the process. With no direct rivals from Audi or BMW to contend with at present and the Mk7 Volkswagen Golf GTE on its way out, Mercedes will no doubt be gleefully rubbing its hands together at the prospect of monopolising the market for posh plug-in hatchbacks – temporarily, anyway.

But while Mercedes has got the jump on its two traditional arch-rivals, that head start won’t necessarily allow the new A250e to shoot straight to the top of the class by default. Even with the hugely appealing savings in company car tax that the A250e’s electrified powertrain currently affords, it won’t do that on its own.

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To succeed here, the plug-in A-Class must complement those attributes with all of the silken refinement, plush comfort and intuitive driveability that has always marked out Mercedes’ finest offerings. Time to find out what’s what, then.

The A-Class line-up at a glance

The Mercedes-Benz A-Class range is as broad as you would expect for a high-volume hatchback – broader, perhaps, due to the presence of the AMG-developed A35 and Mercedes-AMG A 45, which exist in stark contrast to the A250e tested here.

One thing the range does lack, however, is an all-electric offering, and while Mercedes has produced an electric B-Class in the past, there’s no sign that a zero-emissions A-Class EV will appear soon.

 

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DESIGN & STYLING

Mercedes-Benz A250e 2020 road test review - hero side

The fourth-generation Mercedes-Benz A-Class is by now a familiar enough sight on Britain’s roads that we needn’t dwell on its appearance in any great detail, other than to say that it remains as desirable looking in 2020 as it did when it arrived in 2018. This new plug-in hybrid version doesn’t change its aesthetic one jot, with the only real visual alteration coming in the form of a new charging port.

However, far more important changes have been implemented beneath the skin. Up front, Mercedes has paired a 1.3-litre turbocharged four-cylinder petrol engine (which it developed with the Renault-Nissan Alliance) with a small electric motor, and they combine to drive the front wheels via an eight-speed dual-clutch automatic gearbox. Together, these two sources of propulsion endow the A250e with a system output of 215bhp, while the electric motor’s 243lb ft of instantly available torque complements the 170lb ft the petrol engine develops at 1620-4000rpm.

LED ‘High Performance’ headlights are standard fare on AMG Line Premium models. Range-topping cars get jazzier lights still, but these are plenty strong enough
Matt Saunders
Road test editor

Power for the permanently excited synchronous electric motor is stored in a 15.6kWh (gross capacity) lithium ion battery that has been squeezed in beneath the rear seats. Mercedes has had to shuffle various bits and pieces around to make way for the battery, so the fuel tank has been shifted backwards and shrunk slightly to 35 litres, and the exhaust system ends at the centre of the car rather than at the rear bumper. The silencer is now housed in the transmission tunnel.

The battery itself is rather large by the existing standards of the class, being very nearly twice the size of that fitted to the outgoing Golf GTE. With its inflated capacity comes even greater range. On the WLTP cycle, Mercedes says the A250e can cover 44 electric-only miles before needing to be charged back up again. With a 7.4kW on-board charger as standard, that job can be tackled in less than two hours when hooked up to a standard seven-pin AC charger, or a faster DC charger can get the battery from 10-80% in just 25 minutes.

As for suspension, the A250e gets the MacPherson strut front and torsion beam rear configuration that appears on cheaper versions of the regular A-Class, and its springs and passive dampers are configured for comfort rather than sporty driving. Mercedes claims a kerb weight of 1680kg, with the battery accounting for 150kg of that figure. On our test scales, the A250e weighed 1665kg, which was split 58/42 front to rear.

INTERIOR

Mercedes-Benz A250e 2020 road test review - cabin

The A250e’s interior is just like that of any other Mercedes-Benz A-Class hatchback. The packaging of the car’s batteries and power electronics means you can’t expand the boot space by lowering the floor, but you are at least presented with a flat loading area that’s flush with both the boot opening and the base of the car’s split-folding seatbacks. There are no ledges or lumps to lift heavy items over, then, and there is reasonable space for a car of this size.

The cabin is a broadly practical and comfortable one, too, with a couple of familiar A-Class caveats. The ‘integrated’ front sports seat design means you don’t get separate, adjustable head restraints (although the A-Class isn’t the only offender on that score these days), while the oversized interior door handles eat into knee room a bit unnecessarily and can even trap your outboard leg if you’re not careful when closing the rear passenger doors.

Infotainment display can convey as much information about the state of the battery, and the mode of powertrain operation, as you’re likely to want.
Simon Davis
Road tester

That apart, though, the A-Class presents you with a cabin to admire: one of high perceived quality, fairly rich and lavish materials and plenty of ritzy technology in quite a particular vision of modern luxury that is easy to buy into. The generous use of glossy black plastic and satin chrome trim in the car won’t please everyone, and some might quibble that the cabin’s underlying quality isn’t any better than that of many other five-door hatchbacks. But most drivers will, we’ll wager, be impressed by the upmarket ambience they find.

The A250e is offered in only AMG Line trim and upwards, so all will be relatively well-equipped cars. Even so, to get Mercedes’ twin 10.3in digital screens for instrumentation and infotainment, as well as its colour-adjustable ambient lighting features (as fitted to our test car), you do have to spend extra on AMG Line Premium trim.

Mercedes A-Class infotainment and sat-nav

The AMG Line Premium trim of our test car is likely to be a common choice among A250e owners, because it’s the point in the range at which you get both of Mercedes’ 10.3in widescreen digital displays as standard, as well as its ‘augmented reality’ navigation prompts (which we thought gimmicky and borderline distracting at first but eventually warmed to a little). A 225W ‘Mercedes advanced’ sound system is also included – something our test car had – and it has all the power most reasonable adults would want.

The navigating logic of the infotainment system is easy to get along with. Mercedes’ separate touchpad input device still doesn’t seem intuitive enough to use after many attempts, but the thumbpad scrollers on the steering wheel spokes work well and the navigation system responds well to voice commands once you learn the order in which it prefers destinations to be input. All A250es have mirroring for Android and Apple phones.

ENGINES & PERFORMANCE

Mercedes-Benz A250e 2020 road test review - charging port

The A250e’s powertrain is an intriguing one for the interested driver, as those of PHEVs often tend to be. It has plenty of outright power and lots of accessible torque when operating in Hybrid mode.

With an electric motor making useful power and torque itself and positioned upstream of the eight-speed automatic gearbox (so that it benefits from the car’s gearing at higher speeds), it also offers good performance when running in Electric mode, which survives a trip to the national speed limit without coming up particularly short on power or forcing you to rouse the car’s reciprocating pistons unless you mean to.

The charging port is located just above the rear wheel arch on the offside of the car. The fuel filler is directly opposite on the nearside.
Matt Saunders
Road test editor

However, for those drivers who aren’t so interested in how the car is doing what it’s doing but would rather it just got on with doing it well, the A250e might begin to disappoint. At times, the gearbox is slow to shift, and frustratingly so when you’re trying to snag reverse quickly during a hurried reverse park or three-point turn. At other times, it’s the stark contrast between the refined operation in evidence when the engine is off and the eruption of noise when the engine suddenly needs to start – and to rev – that rather explodes the bubble of luxurious calm that the car might otherwise inhabit.

Unfortunately, the 1.3-litre four-cylinder engine that Mercedes chose for this car isn’t the greatest. It’s reasonably quiet and economical at a cruise, but noisy and coarse at revs to the point of intrusiveness. It is, at least, fairly economical, which means that once the car’s electric-only range (44 official miles here turns out to be more like 30-35 in the real world, depending on usage) has been used up on your daily commute, you might still average better than 55mpg in ‘range-extended’ running – which, among PHEVs, is not to be sniffed at.

The car’s biggest driveability failing, however, is the regrettable unpredictability of its braking system. A brake energy management system in the car automatically blends its trailing-throttle ‘recuperation’ settings up and down based on information that it’s getting from the navigation system and its forward sensors in a bid to slow you down at just the right pace and time for roundabouts and junctions, and to help you scavenge energy in heavy traffic.

However, the worst consequence is that every time you come off the accelerator and on to the brake pedal, you do so with a little trepidation, not quite knowing exactly how much ‘engine braking’ retardation and subsequent pedal ‘bite’ you’re going to get – and that just makes the car harder to drive smoothly than it should be.

RIDE & HANDLING

Mercedes-Benz A250e 2020 road test review - on the road front

It’s a fact that any other Mercedes-Benz A-Class you buy with the A250e’s power level would have lowered sport suspension, or four-wheel drive, or both. A heavy, 215bhp version of the car with neither of the above is never likely to represent Mercedes’ hatchback at its dynamic best, less still one with tyres most likely chosen more for their lack of rolling resistance than their adhesiveness.

Much as it might come as a surprise to anyone spending upwards of £35,000 on a hatchback, that’s where the A250e starts in this section. It does at least handle benignly enough and in a stable and ultimately contained fashion, but you’re aware of its weight while steering it around tighter bends, waiting for that perceptible moment when its chassis settles laterally as you do.

Handling is reasonably benign, but body control is loose at times and the car feels ponderous in slow corners; ride is fairly comfortable but disappointingly noisy with it
Richard Lane
Deputy road test editor

Lateral body control isn’t actually too bad in outright terms – not least, you suspect, because Mercedes deliberately chose tyres that wouldn’t challenge the car’s suspension too much. But vertical poise is pretty poor, with bigger inputs disturbing the car’s levelness quite markedly and the car taking a long time to return to equilibrium after crests and over cambers.

Along with the quite meek mechanical grip level, there comes a slight untidiness to the handling when hurried out of a bend or away from standing – exacerbated by the fact that you don’t have precise control over powertrain response, of course. But understeer can rear its head even in steady-state cornering if you dare to rein back the car’s electronics or press it along a bit.

Comfort and isolation

The A250e does all right in one of these respects, but less well in the other. Mercedes’ decision to stick with the A-Class’s ‘comfort’ suspension for this derivative does at least make it fairly comfortable both at low speeds and high. It settles to a calm, easy motorway cruise and has plenty of compliance over bigger lumps and bumps around town.

More’s the pity, therefore, that the car’s ride is surprisingly noisy, resonant and occasionally abrupt with it. Coarse asphalt tends to cause quite a roar in the cabin – this might again be an unwanted side effect of hardish-compound, economy-minded tyres – while sharper ridges and bits of raised ironwork certainly thump their way through. If you didn’t already know that the car’s chassis was operating near the edge of its comfort zone due to the car’s outright mass, this apparent lack of isolation might well tell you anyway.

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Aside from the limitations of the integrated headrests mentioned earlier, the driving position is good. The seats are comfortable, with extendable under-thigh support for longer-legged drivers, and plenty of outright driver leg room is available.

Assisted driving notes

The A250e has a lane-keeping system, a driver monitoring system and an active brake assist crash mitigation system as standard. However, you have to spend £1495 on Mercedes’ Driving Assistance package to get a car that can change lanes by itself on the motorway, can employ braking intervention to prevent you from wandering into the path of a car coming head on or at a T-junction, and can automatically adopt temporary gantry speed limits.

Our test car didn’t have it – and although it had all the necessary sensors to make an operating active radar cruise control, it didn’t have one of those, either. The radar-based recuperation system is one whose regrettable influence on the car’s driveability we cover below. We couldn’t easily find a way to deactivate it, although there might be such an option buried deep in a driver assistance menu.

Thankfully, the lane-keeping and automatic emergency braking systems are easier to turn on and off.

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MPG & RUNNING COSTS

Mercedes-Benz A250e 2020 road test review - hero front

As we’ve seen, the A250e uses an usually large battery pack, and yet as a hatchback, it’s considerably lighter than the many saloon and SUV plug-in hybrids on sale. The 44 miles of claimed electric driving range that result from this combination of factors will sound very alluring for those who commute less than, say, 30 miles each way to work, and with the ability to charge at home or work, or both, it would certainly be possible to run the A250e like any other hatchback, except with meagre fuel bills.

Another advantage of the plug-in tech is that, with such low official CO2 emissions, company car drivers will enjoy a very low benefit-in-kind rate: just 6%. And now that plug-in versions of the Golf and Audi A3 have been discontinued, the Mercedes also sits some way ahead of comparable cars in terms of depreciation. Forecasts show that after three years and 36,000 miles, the A250e will have retained 44% of its value, compared with 35% for the Mini Countryman Cooper S E Sport, and the Hyundai Ioniq PHEV lags even further behind. This, of course, will be especially beneficial for those intending to buy on PCP finance.

With premium rivals now out of the picture, the Merc’s residuals easily better those of alternatives like the Mini Countryman and Hyundai Ioniq
Simon Davis
Road tester

In terms of day-to-day use, the only ergonomic caveat the A250e carries over its range-mates is the slight fall in boot capacity, as a result of the electronics that sit beneath the floor. And as we said, fully charging the battery at home takes about 1hr 45min if you have a 7.4kW wallbox fitted – usefully fast for a PHEV – and it’ll get from 10-80% in about 25 minutes via a public rapid charger.

 

VERDICT

Mercedes-Benz A250e 2020 road test review - static

Although the A250e has a performance level that could be described as athletic, it is in some ways probably the worst car in the Mercedes-Benz A-Class range to drive because of its loose body control, irksome driveability quirks and often-noisy ride.

And yet, thanks to a 44-mile electric range rating delivered by its usefully large battery pack and the 6% benefit-in-kind tax liability that confers, it might be the only A-Class that really interests you – and possibly the only company car on the entire market that does.

Falls some way short of a rounded ‘premium’ driving experience
Richard Lane
Deputy road test editor

Moreover, for someone genuinely keen to move progressively towards the electrification of their daily motoring, the A250e could deliver a more useful incremental step than a lot of PHEVs. It has a genuine 30-something-mile range and good, usable performance during electric running, plus it can be charged quite quickly and its electric driving characteristics can be adjusted to suit your personal tastes.

Those still waiting to dip a toe into the world of electromobility could do a lot worse than to dip it in the A250e’s direction. If you do, however, do so knowing you’ll be getting a car that misses at least as many dynamic standards expected of a £35,000 Mercedes as it hits.