I’m not fancy. I’m just grateful that I get paid to write about and drive cars all day, and honestly it doesn’t take much to make me happy. I own a 2017 Mini Cooper S, and when people ask me what my dream car is I don’t really have an answer because my Mini does everything I need. I buy new clothes maybe once a year, I live in a studio apartment, and my favorite food is a tie between mozzarella sticks and pupusas. Having said that, when the fabulous folks at Mercedes offered to loan me a nearly quarter-million-dollar 2024 Mercedes-AMG GT63 S E Performance 4-Door Coupe to drive out to the Las Vegas Grand Prix, I leaped at the opportunity.
Full Disclosure: Mercedes loaned me a AMG GT63 S E Performance 4-Door Coupe to drive out to Vegas, put me up in a fancy hotel, fed me lots of delicious food, and facilitated a truly once-in-a-lifetime experience at the Las Vegas Grand Prix for me. And I got to scare the crap out of my mom over Thanksgiving with launch control, which was an extra little treat.
Right off the bat, it was pretty darn cool to know that the car I was driving was actually faster than the nonhybrid GT63 that’s used as the Formula 1 safety car. Despite having potentially the longest and most convoluted name of any car on sale today, the plug-in-hybrid Mercedes-AMG GT63 S E Performance 4-Door Coupe is an alarmingly quick vehicle when the stars align properly. Twist the steering wheel–mounted drive mode dial over to Race mode, tap the center console–mounted traction control button to set it to Sport Traction, stomp on the brake pedal, floor the accelerator and say a quick prayer, because the Race Start launch control is violent. Release the brake, and let out a guttural scream that your ancestors could hear as the GT63 gut punches you into the massaging seat and you rocket away from a stop — almost any stoplight challenger dumb enough to think they’re faster.
Okay, so that happens like half the time. The other half of the time when you’re trying to scare the crap out of your mom or your friends, you do all that and the gauge cluster says, “Race Start not possible,” and then you look like an idiot. Without Race Start active, the GT63 is still very rapid, just nowhere near as violent. You see, the GT63 S E Performance has the same twin-turbo 4.0-liter V8 engine as the regular GT63, but gains a rear-mounted electric motor with 201 horsepower and 236 pound-feet of torque and a 6.1-kWh battery pack. As with other performance hybrid systems, this incredibly complex powertrain has to be in the proper mode at the proper time to shine its brightest, and even then sometimes it just doesn’t do what you want it to do.
Race Start unlocks the car’s full potential, unleashing all 831 horsepower and 1032 pound-feet of torque for a claimed 0-to-60-mph time of a blistering and very believable 2.8 seconds. What other large German performance sedan recently got hybridized? Oh yeah, the BMW M5. It was also universally criticized for being porky, but the GT63 S E Performance is hardly any different, weighing in at over 5,320 pounds, just under 70 pounds less than the M5. That said, the AMG is 0.6 seconds quicker to 60 than the BMW, but it still feels hefty when the road gets twisty.
Aside from the herculean power, the GT63 S E Performance is a confusing car to me. My press car cost $225,570 (including a $1,150 destination charge), which is more than the starting price of a Bentley Flying Spur, a car that carries a lot more panache. The AMG GT 4-Door has been around since 2019, and its interior does look dated compared to the three-pointed star’s newest offerings, though I personally appreciate the array of physical buttons for climate and drive modes. When my non-car-people friends got into the AMG GT, they asked if it was a few years old since the interior didn’t look as good as the CLE press car I had a while back. So, depending on your persuasion, this generation-old interior can either be a good thing or a bad thing. The front seat cup holders objectively suck, though. Smaller cups don’t fit because the cupholder cubby is too deep and it pops the top off of a grande coffee cup, and if you put something bigger in there it totally and infuriatingly eliminates the usability of the climate control buttons.
The platform’s age also shows a bit when using the GT63 for daily driving duties. The ride isn’t necessarily bad, but it doesn’t feel refined. Traversing the broken concrete roads around Hollywood results in structural jiggles and some strange noises that sound like an overinflated basketball being hucked at a brick wall, a sharp kind of ping noise that’s disconcerting. I also experienced some surprising phantom behaviors from the $1,950 Driver Assistance package. When at low speeds, the system engages a traffic jam assist mode that is supposed to help out, but it intermittently detected non-existent vehicles in front of me when the lead car would move forward. I have years of experience with this particular system and it has never behaved this way in the past for me, so I’m guessing it was a sensor calibration issue, but annoying nonetheless.
Aside from those issues, being in the hybrid GT 4-Door is a pretty special experience. The $1,100 Acoustic Comfort package includes increased cabin insulation and acoustic glass for the windshield and side windows, which makes it a pretty nice place to sit while the world goes on around you. The interior looks and feels high quality, and though I have never seen a red-rimmed steering wheel before, it’s certainly distinctive to say the least. My test car had the $3,350 Executive Rear Seat package, which drops seating capacity to four and includes a “fixed center business console” with heated and cooled cup holders. If you’re putting an executive in the back of a GT 4-Door, they had better be small because that sloping roofline restricts head room and the rear quarters are a bit cramped as a whole. A huge rear hatch opens to reveal a compromised yet still usable trunk that has a large elevated rectangle where the E Performance hardware lives.
Like in the AMG C63 S E Performance, that E Performance hardware isn’t designed to win green car of the year. The 6.1 kWh battery only has 4.8 kWh of usable capacity, which from my experience allowed for an EV-only range of about four miles. The regenerative braking system only functions intermittently, and every single time you change drive modes you have to re-set your regen levels if you prefer anything above minimal regen. A pro of such a small battery is that the brakes can actually capture enough energy to add significant charge to the battery, but sometimes the car wouldn’t allow regen to activate, and I couldn’t find any logical reason why.
The brakes and transmission would occasionally team up to create scary and unpredictable stopping behaviors in low-speed traffic, too. Sometimes I would try to come to a smooth stop at a traffic light, the transmission would suddenly jerk and I would have to apply way more brake pressure than normal to prevent a crash. The hybrid system is mostly transparent in normal use, but it has unpredictable moments where it feels poorly integrated and definitely not suited for a car costing nearly a quarter-million dollars. It also only equates to tiny fuel savings, with EPA ratings of 25 MPGe with the hybrid system functional and 18 mpg in strictly ICE operation. In my experience, I saw around 20 mpg in mixed driving conditions. For reference, the non-hybrid GT63 S is EPA rated at 15 mpg city and 21 mpg highway.
So, then, is it a good car? Aside from the speed not objectively, but subjectively it’s stupid powerful, stupid excessive, and actually turns a lot of heads despite my press car being a boring shade of flat gray. If you want the ultimate comfortable status symbol that’s still quick, spend the same money on the Bentley Flying Spur. If you want an obscenely powerful and unique car that can occasionally be used to seat four and has at least a bit of electric range, you should give the GT63 S E Performance a look. It’s quicker than the regular GT63 S 4-Door, but who really needs to drive a sedan quicker than the standard AMG GT63 S? Nobody that’s who, but that’s also why it’s cool, and why you might really want it.
