This 2013 Mercedes-Benz C63 AMG sedan is a real miscreant’s car. Rarely does a car combine accessibility with nuttiness in a way that makes me immediately comfortable with the idea of kicking the traction control off and driving like a teenager — this thing does.
Is the interior nice? Yeah, it’s good — though Mercedes could have covered up some of the soft-touch plastics with nice leather for the money. The seats are awesome, deep, and supportive.
It looks good on the outside, too, with Mercedes stylists allowing the proportions to do the talking rather than boy-racer adornments.
The 6.2-liter lump they call a 6.3 is so cool that there should be a Tumblr dedicated to it. Get one, flash the ECU, and there’s an SLS AMG motor in your sedan. Even without the binary hot-rodding, you’ve got two coca farms worth of endorphin production up there and the only thing keeping you from shot gunning it right into your heart is your discretion and the local gendarmes.
It made one of my passengers a believer over the weekend when I stomped on the throttle to get out of a lane on the expressway that had come to a complete stop. After we quickly zipped up to expressway speeds they said, “Wow.” And wow indeed with 451 hp and 443 lb-ft of torque in a 3,600-pound package. It’s not part of the 500-hp club, but for a car this size and weight, it doesn’t have to be. It packs all the power you’ll ever need and helps produce one of the most entertaining vehicles in the Mercedes lineup.
Rory mentions the transmission being the weak part of the C63 equation, and he is right. A dual-clutch gearbox or a traditional manual (keep dreaming!) would help bolster this car’s performance credentials, but I don’t think this multi-clutch unit is all bad. It’s quick on upshifts, and downshifters are reasonably well programmed when you have the car in sport mode and full automatic. If you opt to play with the paddles, it’s slow to react to commands to make me prefer to let the computers do all the work for me.
It’s a tight chassis that changes directions almost instantly thanks to steering that’s direct, communicative, and weighty enough. Suspension tuning is firm to keep the C63 surefooted through corners with not much roll to speak of, which does mean daily ride quality does suffer a bit, but it’s not violent to the point of being unbearable. You could easily drive this around on a daily basis without getting out and feeling wrecked.
With all the power going to the rear wheels and cutting traction aids, you have a good amount of fun swinging the back end around, which is always a good thing. It’s a forgiving chassis that reacts well to be pushed hard. Brakes are also strong with firm pedal feedback.
The overall simplicity of the C63 AMG is another thing I’ve come to appreciate over the years. There aren’t a bunch of buttons to adjust suspension, steering, and whatever else you can think of. BMW is guilty of over-complicating its performance cars like the M5/M6, and even the previous M3 had a fair number of buttons to mash to change how the car behaved. The C63 isn’t like that, and is more of a throwback when you think about it, with just a big naturally aspirated engine stuffed in under the hood and a set suspension. Not much tinkering is required because you just hop in, fire it up, and hit the road to have a ton of fun.
