2021 Mercedes-Benz GLA 250 Off-Road Review: Mud, Rocks and Sand

The Mercedes-Benz GLA has received significant upgrades for 2021. Does this finally make their smallest crossover worthy of hitting the trails? We see just how far we can take it, on this episode of Driving Sports TV. The GLA 250 we're testing today came with the standard 251 horsepower turbo-4 and optional 4MATIC all-wheel drive. It's loaded with extras, boosting the base price of $38,230 all the way to $51,205 including destination. In the past, we've been pretty impressed with 4MATIC's ability to move power around to where it's needed. Does that hold true even on this entry-level Mercedes crossover? So far I haven't done anything with the drive modes. This is all normal drive mode and I have my four-wheel drive indicator up here so I can see power distribution front to back and it's showing that yeah it's mostly front-wheel drive and when you're on the freeway it basically is front-wheel drive for all intents and purposes and then once you're out here you're getting a little bit of slip I can see a little power shifting to the back actually this suspension is pretty good for this harsh stuff it's not bad at all but can I get it a little bit sideways in normal drive mode let's try kicking out the back oh yeah traction control definitely sticks its nose in though did not like that it's now pouring rain so what I'm going to do is I'm going to sit here and take a quick break and hope that this weather passes there's a lot of times where you just kind of hang out either you know if you're at an autocross and you have lots of time on your hands in between your session or if you're in the mountains and you're just waiting for a bad weather system to pass no better way to pass it than playing what is a essentially a triple a game on your iphone and that is raid shadow legends I don't have a lot of time to spend learning a new game so I really liked how it walked me through the basic mechanics without having to go through tedious tutorials this really is a game you can just pick up and play but if you have the time you can literally play for hours customizing champions building teams slaying dragons you know the cool stuff it also gets updated all the time in fact they just added a new artifact forge where you can craft valuable artifacts directly there's also a new advanced quest system with big rewards and new champions as if that's not enough doom tower is in development which I'm pretty stoked about you can find me in the game under the name R Douthin if you're quick enough you can even join my clan go to the video description click on the specials link and if you're a new player you will get 100 000 silver plus one energy refill plus 10 mystery shards and one free champion all the treasure will be waiting for you here oh well looks like the rain's here to stay I've now spent way too much time playing a game I'll come back to that later let's go ahead and see how this vehicle does in the real world up the rock climb and away we go oh setup we need setup I almost got distracted from the game there we're going to go ahead and put it not just in off-road mode now we're going to go one step further and I'm going to go ahead and jump up to a theme and I'm going to load adventure theme and what it does is it optimizes the drive train to give me slow creepy crawly power it also if I go full screen there will give me incline angle wheel angle it gives me all the data that I really need uh except I don't have a front camera on the underside you know with some of the higher end models you can get like wheel cameras this doesn't have that but you know this is around 50 grand so what do you really expect right okay away we go for glory oh this really does a good job of making it so that I can creep because of course off-road mode on the drive train makes it so that my throttle response is a lot slower which is what you want in off-road because you don't want those those jerky moves you want to be able to smoothly apply power I also see that the power is going to the rear axles now here's the tricky part of the course this is where I'm going to take all traction off of this wheel in that wheel and this is where we see how well brake vectoring gets us out of the situation I just keep my foot in it you can even see it happening on the graph there which is pretty cool so we're at a 21 percent climb and there we go no problem what a great system I mean I always like 4matic so I'm not really surprised but uh no it's great to see that even on their entry-level model they haven't really you know neutered it it actually works like it's supposed to now let's head on to the next bit so far no problems you know it's just smooth I really like the throttle feel right now now for this next bit we're going to go deep in with the front right and what that's going to do is going to lift the back tire but it should give traction on these three tires so we'll see how one wheel off in the back affects the climbing capability power power power power power foot's all the way down and then it gives up there we go there we go come on you can do it this is steep come on give me my gauge cluster back and we're at 22 24 25 there we go nice okay so the little GLA what are you having trouble with now okay the GLA is actually really good for your basic you know rocky trailhead road it did a really good job of putting power to the back when it needed it and overall just a great ride in conditions like this but we're not done yet next one is hill descent control this does actually have it uh to activate it I need to hit the little car button down here I need to hit dsr up there and it sets it oh can I set it it says four miles per hour so is this just going to set it at four miles per hour it does can I shift it down so it defaults to four miles per hour but that can be adjusted all I have to use is the cruise control set and I can dial it all the way down to one mile per hour nice huh this is great I wish every car would do this makes coming down even a hill like this really easy unfortunately this location isn't available year-round because soon the snow will hit but for right now we get to do things like river crossing let's see how this does now I got a log on the right I have about maybe a little less than a foot deep of water and sand on each bank let's see if we can get through this before I do this let's go ahead and switch it into off-road mode and I am not going to stop in the middle of this for sake of demonstration because I want to make sure that I can get through okay okay here we go water crossing and up we go nice wow no problem at all this system is really impressive I mean short of ground clearance and short of like really hardcore articulation this thing will get you through most everyday situations which is great I mean you could hit any trail with this thing do that again now I'm going to try to cut it really steep on the inside and this is where our Volvo actually got stuck almost last time that was the e-all-wheel drive version so let's go up the sand oh slow slow got it got it grip is good I should check what tires these are because these things are actually doing great continental somethings oh there it is pro contacts yeah those are those work great I am a little concerned about ground clearance so I'm going to go ahead and stop the vehicle and see what the real ground clearance is because they claim 5.3 inches which is ridiculously low but they also note Mercedes does that that is with the vehicle fully encumbered obviously one driver not fully encumbered so let's see what it is I even brought with me a tape measure so you know the bottom is really flat I don't see anything hanging down under eight and a half inches that doesn't seem like that can be right but actually this sill right here the bottom of it is exactly at nine inches now let's put that clearance to the test with our most challenging crossover course the cross cut climb now before we get all the way to the really hard part we're going to start on this lower incline and just see if it's good enough for the final challenge okay so the first thing we're going to do is switch this into adventure mode for that I just switch it over to the theme adventure like all other cars that I put on this particular course I'm going to stop halfway up and then I'm going to start again and we'll see how the all-wheel drive system responds so I'm going to go halfway up about right there and we're going to stop now we're at a 25 percent nope 33 percent incline so this is pretty steep and now let's see how this power gets transferred around the 4Matic all-wheel drive system showing lots of power to the back can it do it can it do it up and it cuts out I think we need a little more momentum and here we go up we go up we go it's spinning those tires those continentals can it make the crest we'd be really careful because it doesn't have a lot of ground clearance I'm detecting it's going to rub there so I'm going to reverse a little to avoid the rub this is where more power would be good gotta go slow up we go up we go yes oh that was not easy that was not easy but it did make it I'm not sure how well it's going to do against that though as we've seen the 4Matic all-wheel drive system has done a good job of transferring power from the front wheels to the back through the electronically controlled transfer clutch that means it can go from 100 of power to the front wheels for economy to a 50-50 split instantly improving traction without the need to build pressure like the older hydraulic system when wheel spin is detected it engages individual wheel brakes to stop the bleed of power and redirect it back into the system this design which relies heavily on electronics and brakes is quite simple compared to the G550's low range with three physical locking differentials but where a lot of people can afford the GLA if they really wanted to the G550 is more than twice the price now let's see if this little GLA 250 can rise to the challenge now it's pretty common for me to stop midway just to test out the system this is not one of those situations this one I have to maintain momentum but only so much momentum to get me over the obstacle and not so much that I'm going to take off my bumper as I go over the crest so let's see how this goes okay I'm in off-road mode still let's do this I'm going to try to straddle now the biggest issue here is that I'm on a really steep incline and I am losing complete traction on well right now it's that wheel can you do this these tires are really just all seasons and I'm afraid doesn't have enough power to the back can you do it can you do it momentum momentum momentum foot's in the throttle it's not doing it interesting though it was putting it showed half of available torque going to that one tire that's interesting let's see that again nope let's get those wheels straight 29 28 29 30 come on can you do it can you do it no it doesn't want to overheat itself obviously let's try a little more to left a little more momentum what is it gonna do it holy smokes it made it yeah this little car just blew my mind holy moly it did it now I need to give it a little bit more momentum but I didn't scrape the underside I didn't smash the front bumper the transmission never gave any indications of overheating I was just concerned it would just because of physics wow okay now we got to watch out for gravity here because this is really this is steeper on the way down than it was on the way up and I gotta watch that crest oh I need to get as straight as I can or I am going to I don't I don't have a lot of ground clearance so I have to approach this as straight as possible so I don't break a rocker panel off okay now I'm going to go ahead and switch it into hill descent control mode and I'm going to dial that down to one mile per hour and we'll get this get this party going listening for scratching none I do have my foot on the brake right now you release one mile per hour descent wow it uses those four wheel brakes to get me straight get me down controlled brilliant so there you have it the uh GLA 250 amazing little vehicle even if you want to do the hard stuff now granted you do have some issues with ground clearance but as you can see today you can do some pretty extreme stuff you want to see more videos like this be sure to subscribe also check out all our historical videos we've taken a lot of vehicles up here you won't believe what we've tried for driving sports tv I'm Ryan Douthit we'll see you again right here next week