Well, these are two pretty similar cars we have here! It's only details that could potentially make the difference. Considering they both belong to the sports car segment and utilize the same 2-door cabriolet body style and the rear wheel drive system, it all comes up to the specific petrol engine choice they offer. The first one has a Mercedes Benz-engineered powertrain under the hood, a 8-cylinder, 24-valves 279hp unit, while the other one gets its power and torque from a 6-cylinder, 24-valves 260hp engine designed by Porsche.

Unfortunatelly, neither of the two vehicles was submitted to the European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP) testing. This makes it virtually impossible for me to pick one over the other and I'm generally against buying such cars as the safety should really always come first. Moving further on, let's take a closer look at some additional safety-related facts. Both vehicles belong to the sports car segment, which is generally classifying them somewhere in the middle safety-wise, still it doesn't help us solve our dilemma, does it? Furthermore, when it comes to weight, a factor that most people underestimate, CLK offers a considerable difference of 25% more metal.

Manufacturers have been building their reliability reputation for decades now and, generally speaking, it appears that Mercedes Benz does have a slight advantage, all the models observed together. These are the official statistics, while our visitors describe reliability of Mercedes Benz with an average rating of 4.3, and models under the Porsche badge with 3.9 out of 5. The same official information place CLK as average reliability-wise, and Boxster is more or less at the same level.We should definitely mention that owners of cars with the same powertrain as CLK rank it on average as 3.0 out of 5, exactly the same as the other one.

Porsche is undoubtly more agile, reaching 100km/h in 1.7 seconds less than its competitor. In addition to that it accelerates all the way to 264 kilometers per hour, 14km/h more than the other car. When it comes to fuel economy the winner has to be Boxster, averaging around 11.4 liters of fuel per 100 kilometers (25 mpg), in combined cycle. We can't ignore that 7% difference compared to CLK.

Mercedes Benz appears just a bit more reliable, although the difference is truly marginal. The most important thing when deciding between any two vehicles should always be safety, both passive and active. In my opinion, everything taken into account, CLK offers significantly better overall protection, taking the lead here. From there things take a different direction, with Porsche outracing its opponent in any situation possible, making it better choice for boy racers. To make things even better, it consumps less fuel! All together, there's not much more to say, in this case I wouldn't even consider anything but Porsche. In any case that's my personal view, built upon all the data available to me. What should decide here though is the way you feel about the two vehicles, and I hope you'll find my guidelines useful in the process. In case you have two minutes to spare I invite you to define your needs, desires and budget and see which car would be chosen by the virtual adviser™, among more than 12.000 different ones in our database.