Mercedes-Benz A250e AMG Line Premium 2020 UK first drive

The A250e is at its best when running as an EV - which it can do for longer and farther than many of the cars with which you might compare it. That 44-mile WLTP range translated into just over 30 miles of range in mixed real-world use during our testing. That may not sound like much, but the fact that the car comes with a 7.4kW on-board charger (twice as powerful as many PHEVs get) means you can refill its battery from a fairly common seven-pin AC charging post in less than two hours, in the time it might take to amble around the shops or to have that meeting.

You get the abiding sense that short-range-commuting A250e owners with driveways on which to charge their cars could probably go for weeks, if not months, without using any petrol in this car. That’s a sense that not all PHEVs give you, by the way - enabled as it is not only by the A250e’s electric range but also by how drivable and swift it is when operating in electric mode. Having performance tested it for an upcoming full road test, I can tell you that, much as the car needs less than seven seconds to hit 60mph from rest when running in Hybrid mode, it’ll do the same sprint in less than 13 seconds without burning a single hydrocarbon.

The car’s electric motor is particularly torquey and, positioned as it is upstream of the gearbox, benefits from being able to run at lower rotational speeds on the motorway and around the national speed limit than it might otherwise. That, in turn, gives the car a broad performance envelope in EV mode, and so it’s easy to keep the the car’s reciprocating pistons quiet and still when you want to, even out of town. 

Having learned from its experience with the Mercedes-Benz EQC, Mercedes allows you to choose from several energy recuperation settings by flicking the car’s shift paddles. Holding down the right-hand paddle effectively puts the car in a ‘coast’ mode in which you get no recuperation at all on a trailing throttle. A couple of flicks of the paddle on the left, however, and you’re in a ‘max regen’ setting in which the car can be driven pretty widely in ‘one-pedal’ style.

There’s also an ‘auto’ regen setting to which the car defaults - not just in electric mode, but in others as well - in which it seeks to regulate brake energy recuperation for itself based on data coming from the navigation system and on what it can work out about your distance to the car in front using its forward sensors. Mercedes isn’t alone in trying this as a means to boost energy efficiency - although rarely do you find it integrated independently of an adaptive cruise control system (something the A250e only gets as an option).

It’s a problematic execution mostly because, when the car is running in Hybrid mode, the brake pedal becomes unpredictable. With the car’s tendency to coast defined entirely automatically, you’re never totally sure how much ‘engine braking’ you’re going to get when you lift your right foot on approach to a junction or roundabout; or, indeed, how much ‘recuperation’ the car is going to do for itself in stop-and-go motorway traffic.

With that abiding sense of uncertainty present, the A250e then presents you with one of the least progressive and intuitive brake pedals this tester has ever encountered. I’ve known cars that ‘prime’ the brake pedal when the frontal crash avoidance system thinks you may be in danger of an accident, with knock-on effects on pedal feel; but this A-Class’s ‘blended’ brake pedal seems to juggle electrical recuperation in and out of the initial pedal travel, and ramp friction braking response up and down, with widely unpredictable results. Perhaps it does make the car a smidgeon more efficient and maybe it will help you avoid an accident one day. Frankly, I’d much rather the car had simply been smoother and easier to drive.

Running under a mix of electric and combustion power, the A250e has Individual, Sport, Comfort and Eco driving modes. It has good initial throttle response in all of them, although the way the piston engine and eight-speed gearbox somewhat lazily respond to bigger pedal inputs in the more laid-back modes might make Sport your default choice for quicker out-of-town motoring.

The car’s outright performance level is strong, particularly when picking up from lower revs in higher manually selected gears, when all that electric motor ‘torque fill’ is poured in. The fairly hard-working 1.3-litre engine doesn’t like revving hard, though. It’s noisy and harsh beyond 4000rpm and, more than anything else, that is what’s likely to limit how interested you’ll be to drive this car with any enthusiasm.