REVIEW: The 671bhp Mercedes-AMG C63 may be ferociously powerful, but does a four-cylinder hybridised engine detract from its charm?
The drive battery is Mercedes-AMG’s own development. While it’s only small by the standards of most luxury PHEVs , its construction is specially designed for close thermal management, high energy density and the sort of rapid and intensive supply and storage of energy that’s necessary to prevent a heavy car like this from running out of electrical oomph on track.
Driving the new C63 on track is a very different experience from the one that the old car traded on so squarely and evocatively. When you’re using Race driving mode, Mercedes-AMG’s Track Precision lap telemetry app logs your position and tells you, via brightly flashing ‘BOOST’ graphics that appear on the car’s digital instrument screen, where best to deploy the better part of the electric motor’s power.
As those revs rise, though, there’s no mistaking what you’re working with. The four-pot just doesn’t rev with the freedom that a bigger multi-cylinder engine would. The car doesn’t stonk on from 5000rpm with quite the ferocity you somehow expect of it, however unreasonably. And, on track at least, it’s a little too easy to run into the car’s rev limiter after a downshift, because the high-rpm power delivery we’ve got used to in a C63 just isn’t there.
The new C63 rides with moderation on the public road and has good body control at faster road speeds, but it begins to jiggle and jounce, and to struggle to rein in its mass, on more testing surfaces. On circuit, you feel the impact of the car’s 2.1-tonne kerb weight in a tendency to push into gentle but persistent understeer through faster sweeping bends - and in a perceptible reluctance to shed speed in harder braking areas.
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