If our friends over at Auto-Motor-und-Sport have it right, then Mercedes-Benz will be changing its naming convention for convertibles and coupes in the near future. The CLK will be the first to go and be replaced by names such as E-Class Convertible and Coupe in 2009.
It’s said that Mercedes will expend this strategy to the other models as well, so that at the end of 2009, the CL name will be gone and replaced by the S-Class Coupe. Now this of course may come as a shock to some people, but if we go back a decade, we will see that Mercedes actually used such names to describe their coupes. Before 1998, the CL was know as the S coupe and before that as the SEC.
The CLK is not a Coupe, it is a Hardtop. It has no pillar between the windows, which coupes do and hardtops don’t. 2 doors make it a 2 door hardtop. The S class is a sedan.
I think CLK stands for Coupe Light Kompac. I think this is how they name their cars and suvs.
Mercedes ought to publish a book regarding their vehicle naming system and their decisions behind it. I guess it is not a bad thing nor anything inventive for them to go back to its roots. But their old system does gets kind of chunky and long when one tries to name it. For instance, SEC 500 where as the current system is just CL 500. I guess now they can associate their coupes to their sedans.
These tend to be so complicated.
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