The Mercedes CLA is a much talked about car, just a few days ago images of the cars final appearance was leaked online for the first time and showed a handsome vehicle worthy of taking over the C-Class position. The CLA has been road testing for what feels like an eternity but always covered in heavy camo that made the cars appearance difficult to gauge, of course we needn’t look much further than the current A-Class for an example of what the new CLA would look like as the same grill style has made it onto the CLA.

The CLA may have been aired on Christmas Day over at Motor Authority but Chinese Toy factories have apparently managed to get their hands on early models to make scale toy models of the new CLA. French toy car maker Norev are among the oldest manufacturers of model cars but moved their production to China and were eventually bought out, it seems that Norev’s products are slipping out the back door to the mighty Taobao.com. Currently it seems the auctions for CLA models have been pulled from Taobao but thanks to Weibo we can see what the model and the CLA looks like in miniature.

Will the CLA be put into production at Beijing-Benz? The answer seems to be yes. The joint venture is struggling to attract sales with the domestically made C-Class and E-Class in the face of incredibly strong competition from the refined BMW range and Audi’s dominant hand. We can expect that Beijing-Benz will move to put models such as the CLA and new B-Class into local production relatively quickly.