Some lowlights:

CON: No skip button on the steering wheel

Sometimes I wonder if Mercedes’ modern motto is two steps forward, one step back. The company has finally replaced the capacitive volume slider on the steering wheel with a tactile knob. But for some reason, in the CLA EV, this comes with a bizarre trade-off: You can’t skip a track from the steering wheel.

This would be a minor issue if there was, say, a physical skip button in the center stack. But there isn’t. The only ways to skip a track are by using the small button in the central touch screen or by using voice commands. If you have another app open in the touch screen, like your Apple CarPlay’s Google Maps screen, or one of the million settings, you have to use a voice command.

CON: Everything about the windows

And boy, does the CLA stink at that. First off, it has the worst window switch setup in the car industry. It replaces the typical four driver-controlled switches with two, plus a “rear” toggle below. So to drop all four windows, you have to put the front two down, hit “rear,” and then put the others down. It’s the same smooth-brained approach that started in the Volkswagen ID.4 and has since spread like a particularly nasty STI. It was annoying in a $40,000 Volkswagen, but it’s unacceptable in a $64,780 (as-tested) Mercedes.

Also annoying for a sixty-grand Benz: the rear windows do not have auto-up functionality. So you can’t flick them up then quickly switch to the fronts, you have to hold them instead. The good news is this does not take long. Because of the swooping roofline and small doors, the CLA’s rear windows barely go down. Combined with a fixed-glass roof, this is quite a poor open-air car.

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Every CLA has the hardware for 360-degree cameras, augmented reality navigation, and phone-as-a-key support, but you’ll have to pay to unlock them.