The instrument cluster defines the car. There is the tubular framing of fuel, speedometer and tachometer gauges — traditional for Mercedes-Benz performance models. There are the letters, “AMG,” shorthand for the names of the founders of Mercedes-Benz’s performance engineering division and for the birthplace of one of them.
The founders are Hans Werner Aufrecht (A) and Erhard Melcher (M). Aufrecht was born near Stuttgart in the village of Grossaspach (G), where AMG began in 1967.
Other indicators of the nature of this week’s car, the 2008 C63 AMG sedan, can be found in the instrument cluster’s main menu. Touch a button on the steering wheel. The “Warm Up” screen, displaying engine oil and coolant temperatures, appears. Another prompt yields “Set Up,” presenting current information on the car’s electronic stability program and transmission mode. And then there is “Race,” allowing the driver, assuming that he or she is so engaged or inclined, to measure lap times around a racetrack.
My associate, Ria Manglapus, and I were inclined. But we found no opportunity to engage. Thus, this review will lack the passion of published throttle-jockey reports on the car. We had no “early whiff of understeer.” Nor did we “nudge the brakes to settle the rear of the car.” Nor had we “unleashed to the rear wheels . . . the prodigious reserves” of the C63 AMG’s 6.3-liter, 451-horsepower V-8 engine, as one scribe wrote of his driving experience.
Note: The “6.3” rubric is more of a marketing than technical designation. Actual engine displacement, the amount of air and fuel that can be packed into a combustion chamber, is closer to 6.2 liters.
We burned no rubber and smoked no tires, as Mercedes-Benz is fond of doing in its TV commercials touting the C63 AMG. We simply drove the car, as we would any we own, on city and suburban streets and East Coast highways. Those venues proved thrilling enough. And the C63 AMG, in nearly all respects of driving performance, was lots of fun and wonderfully competent as driven.
The C63 AMG is not a family car in the manner of Mercedes-Benz’s other entry-level luxury C-Class models — the C300 Sport, C300 Luxury, C300 Sport 4Matic, C300 Luxury 4Matic, or the quite impressive C350 Sport.
We’ve fallen in love with all of those models, especially the C350, which offers ample power (268 hp), performance, and luxury beyond what most of us would consider “entry level.” But the C350 and its lower-ranked C-Class siblings all feel more inclusive than the C63 AMG. That is, they look and feel expressly designed for drivers and passengers.
The high-performance C63 AMG, on the other hand, treats passengers as afterthoughts. It is more adept at comfortably seating four people, rather than the five easily accommodated by other C-Class cars. Its styling and stance substantially are more aggressive. Its big V-8 consumes premium gasoline in such prodigious amounts — $85 for approximately 400 miles of driving — “AMG” could stand for “All Money Gone.”
But that criticism borders on unfair. The AMG division of Mercedes-Benz caters to the Walter Mitty crowd — weekend racers who, with varying degrees of competence and experience, pursue on sanctioned speedways glory that often eludes them in daily life. They are a dedicated crowd, often boisterous in defense of their pastime and brutally dismissive of questions about the environmental and fuel costs of their hobby.
It is easy for the putatively enlightened to thumb noses at the Walter Mitty group. It is easy, but often hypocritical. The truth is that most of us contain something of the soul of Walter Mitty. Had Ria and I the chance to put the C63 AMG on a sanctioned racetrack, we would have taken it. We would have felt momentarily guilty about building up lots of torque, smoking tires, and trying to launch the car from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 4.3 seconds in the manner Mercedes-Benz engineers and professional drivers. But, by golly, we would have put on our track helmets and gone to it, laughing and speeding all the way.
There is a fine line between hypocrisy and virtue. Think of it as parking a gas-electric hybrid Toyota Prius fuel-sipper outside of a mini-mansion with a solar roof — housing a family of three on a suburban cul-de-sac safely isolated from the potentially unwelcome diversity of mass transit.
Loving the C63 AMG, as we do, is something like that. It has more horsepower than anyone really needs in a compact/mid-size, rear-wheel-drive car. It can run faster than any automobile legally is allowed to run on all public roads in the United States. It is fuel-thirsty. It is in many ways bad, bad, bad. But it is evil that we so very much long for and enjoy, although we ultimately might come to loathe the consequences of our actions.
The hunger nonetheless remains. We want to, as one of our fellow auto scribes, Andreas Stahl, put it, “nudge the brakes to settle the rear of the car, flick the steering wheel into the corner entry while grabbing 2nd gear with the shift paddles, then turn sharply but not so aggressively as to accelerate the weight transfer, and finally allow the inside tires to mount the painted curb at the apex as we nail the throttle hard.”
Yeah. That’s it. That’s what we want. We want this one back.
