The Mercedes-Benz CLA Sure Is Getting Expensive

The CLA to Mercedes would be like Ford selling a Focus sized F-150. I doubt many MB customers are buying this crap. It's the posers who are leasing them. Get the posers to pay more every month while depreciation for this sh*tbox continues to increase. Win-win. Posers get their glowing Merc star lighting package, Merc gets more of their money and anyone desperate enough to buy one used can keep picking them up for 1/2 off the bloated sticker price.

I think you're missing the whole point of the cited comments, let me try to explain this in larger terms. Humanity can essentially be measured on a Bell Curve, and depending on which percentile a person is in a certain area largely determines their world view. From the automotive sales standpoint, Mercedes-Benz in North America has historically targeted the 90% income percentile and up for sales while the remains of the top quartile are realistically the CPO target and the other three income quartiles are generally out of the sales equation but may not only aspire to the brand but probably will acquire very used models long into their life as status symbols. We see this with many other luxury products as well, so its nothing new. Mercedes' main customer base has changed little over the years even as the end product quality has gone up and down in about the past twenty, but with a product like CLA Mercedes is attempting to capture a whole new market in the US for it's new products. Some traditional buyers may find it appealing I don't know, but a traditional buyer who has experienced a true Mercedes would only need to spend a limited amount of time in the first CLA to realize it was not up to par. The 50-75% income quartile who has no previous exposure to a new Mercedes designed and built for the 90% percent price point does not understand nor probably cares about Mercedes heritage or Mercedes built quality, they simply have no point of reference. Daimler knows this and is using its economies of scale to build a cheaper product at a certain price point for a market it can con. Buyers who actually understand what a Mercedes is so to speak see right through the con job. This is the point of the cited comment, this product is lacking a certain amount of Mercedes DNA because from the start it wasn't designed or intended to be a Mercedes on par with what the company sold previously in North America. All three major German marques are in on this game now, and while I am not as familiar with the rival offerings from BMW and Audi, all three are diluting their branding in order to sell/lease product at a cheaper price point to the lower income quartile. Perhaps BMW and Audi did a much better job? I'm not sure. I do know much like Jaguar failed with the X-type, the CLA as introduced was not up to any kind of Mercedes standard for N.A. product and the so called critics agreed. I hope after several years of sales the engineering teams corrected most of the defects with the product, but this isn't to say the product is still up to the level it's supposed to be as a Mercedes. "MB consumers aren’t so brand loyal that they ignore very similar offerings from Audi and BMW and others." Buyers north of the 90% income percentile tend not to be loyal to any brand, they literally have the income to choose virtually anything they want and eat any depreciation without care. These are the people who buy things like the S-class, 7-series, XJ etc. because they will have discarded it quickly and never see most of the serious problems we know these models tend to encounter. The point of the dilution exercise is to target those in the lower quartiles on leasing schemes and turn them into regular customers, but ultimately they are being hoodwinked by marketeers and without any understanding of a better quality product they are willfully ignorant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve