Mercedes has been brutally honest about its plan to slim down the compact car offerings and focus on the bigger and pricier models with their higher profit margins. The lineup will be split into three categories (Entry Luxury, Core Luxury, and Top-End Luxury), but the bulk of future investments will go into vehicles from C-Class and above. These changes are being made in a bid to become "the world's most valuable luxury car brand."
Consequently, Entry Luxury will be simplified from seven to four model variants. While the three-pointed star has refrained from talking about the cars on death row, a decision regarding which compact models are staying and which are going the way of the dodo has allegedly been taken. German paper Handelsblatt cites Mercedes insiders claiming the A-Class and B-Class will be no more after 2025.
Both the A-Class hatchback and saloon will reportedly be eliminated from the lineup in roughly three years' time. According to the same source, the swoopy CLA is staying, and to our surprise, so is the CLA Shooting Brake. It's unclear whether the long-wheelbase A-Class Sedan will live on in China where it's locally produced to fight the BMW 1 Series Saloon.
Because customers still have an insatiable thirst for crossovers, the GLA and GLB will live to see a new generation. These surviving models are believed to make the transition from the current MFA platform to Mercedes' upcoming MMA architecture. The German luxury brand has already provided a sneak preview of its first MMA-based car, which seemed to be a sleek saloon in the same vein as the CLA.
But first, a small update:
In the meantime, the current crop of compact Mercedes models is bound to go through a mid-cycle update. Spy shots have suggested the changes will be discreet, likely because Mercedes doesn't want to spend a lot of money on a platform it plans to retire by the middle of the decade.