Two surprising revelations surfaced over the course of the first night I’ve stayed awake throughout since I was a schewdunt: Firstly, New York may be the city that never sleeps, but you just try getting a cup of coffee anywhere in London at 3.00 in the morning; and, secondly, with precious little else to peer at as the hours creaked by, I’ve come to the conclusion that the new BMW Gran Coupe is a seriously handsome car.
Gone (largely) is the big arse that has always rather blighted 6-series couture, to be replaced, frankly, by something of a big ask… To wit; isn’t calling this a coupe precisely that? Simply blacking out the B pillars alone does not a coupe make. In truth, this is merely an exceptionally svelte four door saloon.
As yet unavailable for selection when we pitched Panamera, Jaguar XJ, Audi A7 and Mercedes CLS 3.0 litre diesels into the fray last autumn, this 640d M Sport version of the Gran Coupe has been slung across Europe, hot foot from launch proceedings, to square up to that which, by a whisker, took the line honours last time around; the CLS 350 CDI BlueEFFICIENCY SPORT.
You may have a diesel powered Gran Coupe for as, um, little as £63,900. This M Sport version costs £68,565. The extra dosh affords you the full M Sport body treatment, including front air intakes that would pass muster on an F 430, with absolutely none of that renowned engineering attitude under the bonnet to back it up.
I find this every bit as annoying as, for instance, Audi’s S Line treatments. But they too are hugely popular, so what do I know about gullible people’s susceptibility to cynical marketing trinketry? To my eye, undeniably spiffing alloys aside, that extra £4665 actually buys you a less attractive machine, notably in the hooter department.
Still, it’s to the Gran Coupe’s credit that it survives the assault of faux M pressed-metal with its dignity intact. Indeed, it even carries off a slightly fat lip in the boot lid department and artfully sidesteps the potential ocular pitfall of a similar JCB assault to that which blights the flanks of the hapless X1.
The BMW’s LED third brake light now spans the entire width of the rear window head, raising real concerns as to the levels myopia may have reached in the Americas. And Ben P, who spanked the map from Strasbourg with the big BMW, says the plastic trim round the exhausts on the lower bumper conjures images of the gurl who’s cruised decorously free of the cubicle with her skirt tucked firmly into her knickers.
Whatever the Gran Coupe may or may not remind you of, it’s certainly a given that, parked alongside, it makes the smaller, more curvaceous and, at just £53,500, considerably less expensive Mercedes -carefully sculpted to combine the spirit of coupe with a stylistic nod to the first generation, mutton-dressed-as-banana CLS- look suddenly and somewhat irredeemably dated. Check out, for instance, the seamless strips of BMW running lights compared to Mercedes’ suddenly passé individual LED dots…
On board, the Gran Coupe’s dashboard design looks, at best, bitty. Even with a smartly finished leather dash top, it lacks real cohesion and resembles more a teetering stack of diverse library books than an homogenous whole.
Efforts are clearly being made to win back the once-trademark driver oriented instrumentation stolen by the Bangle era interiors. The centre console barely tilts towards the helm, but the design places a strong emphasis on ‘his’ side by holding the opposite side of the console in place with a gigantic, leather ‘n’ stitching spar, which flows south from the dash top, terminating as a platform for the iDrive control. This is all very well, but the whole is quite intrusive on the passenger footwell, providing something of an occupational hazard for the right knee.
The front seats are entirely comfortable, yet the driving position is a little flawed. There’s a lack of adequate reach adjustment to the helm, and the large, fat-rimmed wheel is made notably uncomfortable by the presence of flappy paddles exactly where the nanny rim shaping dictates your fingertips must rest. One noticed, this really niggles; I find it a major ergonomic faux pas.
I also find a need to hoist the seat nose bleed aloft in order to see enough through the windscreen. Even then, at 16’ 5”, this is a huge car and, without the merciful addition of cameras mounted on the front wheel arches, finding frontal extremities when parking might best be achieved, super tanker crew-style, with the aid of a folding bicycle kept in the suitably capacious boot.
Perhaps it’s called a Gran Coupe because that’s the way BMW intended it to be helmed; the driver peering through the gap twixt dash-top and steering wheel rim…
Topping off the centre console stack, a huge multi-information screen works well when it comes to portraying 360 degree, multiple camera-sponsored images of the car for fixed bayonet, close-quarter manoeuvring work, but looks terrible in sat nav guise, the map design proving strangely illegible by both day and night.
I remain gently astonished by automotive levels of multimedia connectivity these days, and gently baffled by my inability to benefit from same. One of the less expensive items amongst the £16,465 of options fitted to this specimen, the BMW is appropriately tricked up, via a still less than intuitive iDrive. Google appeared pretty much instantaneously, but 3.00am efforts to dial up Fenton’s hilarious Richmond Park deer routing exploits on YouTube in an effort to metamorphose the burgeoning threat of serious lolling into much needed levity were sadly unfulfilled. Where’s a 10 year old when you need one…?
The addition of 4.4 inches to the wheelbase affords rear seat occupants generous portions of legroom, unless, of course, they’re sitting in the entirely tentative fifth ‘seat’ in the middle. The centre console runs all the way home to the rear seat base, so only jump jockeys with buttocks four inches wide and aficionados of rib speedboat seating need apply.
Quality overall seems pretty high, with the proviso that there are some areas where BMW appears to have been siphoning money off. A couple of the cubby lids feel a tad flimsy and don’t exactly ooze into operation, whilst the base side-mounted seat control panel both looks and feels cheap and, indeed, nasty. Which, given it’s about the first thing you see on opening the door, is more than a pity.
After time in the BMW’s gently un-special, modern-office-on-the-move cabin, then, the textures and finishes of the CLS interior feel entirely stately home. You wouldn’t be at all surprised to bumble round a corner and bump into Old Scrotum, the wrinkled retainer, buffing the breast plates lining the passageways…
Dated the new BMW may indeed make the Mercedes interior feel, and yet the latter retains an undeniably degree of effortless class the BMW cannot emulate. There may be a whiff too much chrome and wood on display for some tastes, but the whole comes together to offer far more visual delight than the Gran Coupe. If only BMW could bring a little more, um, elegance to the party… Then again, if only Mercedes could occasionally muster a little less fuddy and, indeed, duddy.
The CLS driving position, however, is peerless. The steering wheel offers perfect fit and feel, and the sports seats are superb and immensely comfortable, despite the presence of unnecessarily over-amorous lateral support bolsters.
The Mercedes cabin is not without niggles, though. The electric front seat adjustment slings you around with unseemly, Goliath-slaying velocity, and the 3-D cityscape function of the commendably legible sat nav screen is all very well, but not if the buildings actually obscure the blue brick road you’re trying to follow, leaving you as frustrated for proper access to the scene as the copper giving chase to the East End getaway car in a hot air balloon.
Here’s a thing though; not only is the CLS over ten grand cheaper than the Gran Coupe, but this specimen is also the closest I’ve come to experiencing a cooking Mercedes, the only extras here being £640 worth of heated front seats and telephone pre-wiring.
Ben P and I spend the wee small hours frantically trying to establish precisely what such unexpected parsimony is actually denying us. After all, last autumn’s group test-winning CLS boasted enough toys to biff the price up to £66,228… Bizarrely, it’s only when we finally blear free of the city streets for a slightly more dynamic dalliance in Mudfordshire that we unearth the answer. The standard fit CLS SPORT lacks just one vital ingredient; adaptive suspension, as we shall shortly discover…
Delivering 261bhp and 457lb ft from what feels like almost tick over through a super-slushy 7-speed transmission, the Mercedes V6 turbodiesel is an immensely appealing powerplant. It delivers power with the smoothness of a freshly buttered banister and enough shove to coax the CLS to 62mph in a surprisingly sprightly 6.2 seconds, yet return over 46mpg. Yet it can’t hold a candle to the monsterpiece lurking under the Gan Coupe’s bonnet.
Easily the single most outstanding feature of the car, BMW’s twin-scroll turbodiesel is, quite simply, magnificent. It is a little vocal at idle but, other than that, you really wouldn’t know it was an oiler. 309bhp and 465lb ft of torque equip it with tremendous urge, abetted by no less than 8-cogs in the box to compensate for the relatively narrow power band. Changes are silken, yet quick enough when you need them, especially when bringing those awkwardly placed paddles into play.
It sounds terrific, pulls like Brad Pitt in a Basildon cocktail bar, murders the Mercedes in performance terms, to a far greater extent than bald, 5.4 seconds to 62mph statistics suggest, and yet, returning over 49mpg, still has the temerity to nail the CLS in the frugality stakes… And that, given that the BMW is three inches longer, a couple of inches wider and 35kg heavier than the Mercedes, is no mean feat.
Ironically, the worst aspect of the Mercedes powerplant when you’re pressing on is that you just can’t hear it. This is a quiet car, but 19” tyre roar easily outshouts anything coming from under the bonnet, which makes using the flappy paddles in anger pointless… The absence of noises off necessitates constant monitoring of a narrow rev band on a tiny rev counter. And that, when travelling quickly on a narrow, twisting road, is not an ideal proposition.
Speaking of which, neither, in the absence of adaptive suspension, is the CLS’s SPORT nomenclature. The ride’s far too tough and the car simply never settles down. Even on the motorway it itches and fidgets like a gorilla forced to wear black tie for the first time. Our group winner last year was also a SPORT, but adaptive undercarriage makes a world of difference, giving access to the proper waft expected in the glide, utterly in absentia here.
BMW’s adaptive suspension, on the other hand, proves not quite as sophisticated as one would hope. Comfort+ is fine for motorway work -stable, pliant and just slushy enough- and, increasingly I found myself settling for it everywhere.
But flung down the most testing road in Mudfordshire, the sportier settings feel somewhat artificial in their efforts to shackle body roll and sharpen dynamics. All the basic ingredients of turn-in, grip and chassis balance seem to be surprisingly well in order, but an underlying sponginess remains beneath a somewhat artificial toughness. The upshot being that scrolling to the tough end of the suspension spectrum feels like nothing so much as gradually introducing more and more dried peas into the princess’ mattress.
Despite being stuck in tough-guy-chewing-marbles-guise, the CLS suspension makes a slightly less decent fist of tight, twisting B road undulations, combining those relentlessly firm underpinnings with acceptable composure yet rather more roll than expected. Though perhaps more fluid overall, the Mercedes doesn’t point or turn in with the alacrity of the big BMW, and certainly doesn’t evince any more poise or body control when jostled over awkward, switchback corners that change camber mid way through. In truth, neither car is particularly balletic in this respect, which, given their size, is hardly surprising.
By way of a counterpoint, where the CLS steering is a consistent delight, the Gran Coupe’s helm is a baffling blend of the disappointingly inert and the alarmingly hyperactive. Despite respectable accuracy and satisfactory weighting that remains pretty constant despite changes in velocity (hence feeling quite heavy in the stooge), The BMW’s wheel tends to buck and writhe like the anaconda caught by Tarzan in his favourite watering hole when the chassis is hardest pressed.
Lob in suspension bumps and thumps elicited by the worst road surface excesses – a situation exacerbated by the hollow, strangely mellifluous bonging of big, 20” run-flat rubber on pothole- and the promised pleasure of rapid progress is often somewhat diminished.
Difficult to call, this one. The Gran Coupe is sufficiently elegant and sharp-suited to make the CLS look dated at a stroke, yet the BMW interior is nothing special while the Mercedes cabin still oozes class, and greater comfort. The masterful Munich powertrain absolutely monsters Stuttgart’s finest and dynamically, despite having a far more pleasing helm that the Gran Coupe, the CLS would appear to be trailing in the former’s wake. Oh for adaptive suspension to at least access the counterpoint of straight line ride comfort…
Then again, with even the non-M Sport Gran Coupe turbodiesel weighing in at over ten grand more than the CLS, you can trick out the Mercedes with active undercarriage and still have something of a bargain on your hands.
Meanwhile, optioned up to a daunting £85,030, this Gran Coupe has inadvertently strolled onto Maserati Quattroporte turf, which would make an interesting comparison…
There’s an argument that suggests even such significant price differences as these aren’t important in cars of this class because they’ll all be company run anyway. If that’s the case, I’ll be going home in the BMW. If not, I’ll be smashing piggy banks and stealing children’s pocket money because, much as I enjoy the Mercedes, I’ll still be going home in the BMW. That engine is simply irresistible.