Mercedes-AMG GT 63 S E Performance : Quick Spin
Back in 2019, reviewing the Mercedes-AMG GT 63 S 4-door was an experience I'll never forget. Brutally fast, sharp as a knife, and with looks to match, that car is in the top 10 of the best cars I've had the pleasure of testing. Flash forward to 2022 and the GT 4-door has seen an update, one that brought to life the Mercedes-AMG GT 63 S E Performance.
E-Performance. Yes, that 'E' is short for the same stuff your brain uses to send the majority of its signals about. But in the Mercedes-AMG GT 63 S E-Performance, the electricity mostly shines in the form of additional power. And thus, the GT 4-door boasts big numbers. Very, very big numbers. Peak performance now comes in at 843 hp and 1200 Nm (1400 Nm for a 10-second boost). But more power isn't always a good thing, nor is electrification. After the initial press launch, the anticipation got paralleled by worrying. After all, how can the years of Affalterbach building insane drivetrains built around V8s be immediately and successfully succeeded by a performance-hybrid drivetrain? So when I landed in Nice for the Design Essentials back in May and the GT 63 S E Performance was in the parking lot, there wasn't a moment of doubt: I'd be spending the day in this thing from the future.
The first thing that hit me when seeing the car, is that the facelift is extremely subtle on the exterior. Non-existent for the 6-cylinder versions even. For the V8 versions, it's hard to recognize for the untrained eye even. A bad thing? No, there wasn't much need for an exterior update as the GT 4-door seems to age exceptionally well. Want to spot the difference? Then the front end of the car is the place to look. Its facia has gained larger outer air intakes, now filled with three vertically placed fins. Unboutley the easiest way to spot a facelift, is if the GT is painted in one of the new colors available for the exterior. Or by peaking inside the cabin and seeing if there's the most recent twin-spoke steering wheel.
Telling the E Performance version apart from the 'regular' Mercedes-AMG GT 63 S isn't a difficult feat though. You'll simply have to see if there are red accents on the car's badging and if there's a charge flap on the rear apron. Other ways I learned to tell them apart are the amounts of accelerations you can do before the car starts hustling your vertebrae around. That is, compared to the car we tested back in 2019. The GT 63 S is an iteration of the GT 4-door which hasn’t seen a change in numbers with the facelift. The E Performance is quicker on paper, but the pull seems far stronger despite it being ‘just’ 3-tenths of a second quicker to the 100-mark.
In essence, the integration of the electronic engine is there to add more. It adds more power, adds more justifiableness to the car in this day and age, adds weight, but it also adds complexity for the driver. And sadly, that complexity affects the first few drives negatively. Why? Because it isn’t as straightforward as it used to be. There’s obviously an EV only mode, good for 12 slow kilometers from the 6.1 kWh battery. But it needs a bit of rewiring in your brain from there on. Only in Race does the drivetrain go full berserk, but in that mode the nature of recuperation changes. It all does follow a logic, yet it doesn’t instantly come natural.
My biggest fear was the weight increase and how that would effect the chassis control. But with the update, AMG took great care in recalibrating their chassis control to accommodate for those extra kilo’s. But as with other aspects of the car, the facelift added to the feel that the GT 4-door got successfully honed further. It hasn’t become easier to use but has done the unimaginable and become even faster. It hasn’t yet convinced me like the pre-facelift version did. Just yet that is, because those few short drives in Nice weren’t enough to wrap my head around the new technology. In October this year, I’ll be testing the car more extensively and for a longer period of time. Check back in then and in the mean time, enjoy the images I took in the French Riviera.
