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Sunny Spain, with its winding roads up the serrated Montserrat mountains surrounding Barcelona, was a perfect place to gauge the latest Mercedes-Benz CLS. It’s a chance to sample the four-door coupe’s performance and handling, appreciate the exhaust notes from the new inline-six, and welcome an expanded lineup that now includes the first Mercedes-AMG CLS 53. A short rain shower seemed cued up to showcase the all-wheel-drive system, as well.

It was an opportunity to see if the third-generation CLS can hold serve in the segment it created when it showed the first concept at the Frankfurt auto show back in 2003. Despite the apparent contradiction of a “four-door coupe,” the world has become enamored with the idea of coupelike lines overlaid on a sedan structure.