MERCEDES-AMG GT 63 S E PERFORMANCE

Is there more to AMG's hi-po hybrid than out of this world numbers?

- GEORG KARCHER

THIS MIGHTY PLUG-IN hybrid doesn't give a hoot about the environment. Instead, the 2022 Mercedes-AMG GT 63 S E Performance uses its 152kW electric motor almost exclusively to boost power and torque figures.

629 kilowatts, wow, thazzebissnis! And 1470 Nm of King Kong muscle to boot, fuelled by five-star juice at a rate of 25 litres per 100km, give or take some, meaning at long last the household petrol and electricity bills can finally match.

Expected to cost around 400 big ones without extras - of which there are many you'll need about five rich aunts to finance this luxury behemoth, not only one.

But with the aftermath of COVID still looming large, Putin's war killing thousands every day, the global economy in the doldrums, and yet another famine raging across Africa, AMG could not have picked a worse time to launch this ultra-high-performance four-door coupe. Yet here it is.

Although dubious social acceptance is, at least in Europe, fast stifling the luxury goods market, the overtly aggressive AMG GT 63 S still succeeds in massaging all the glands that matter to the rich enthusiast, ticks all the relevant boxes, opens the grand adrenalin floodgates and still stirs more old-fashioned emotions than the greenest 1000bhp-plus electric supercar can manage.

It hits our mental sweet spot like a drug, as every old-fashioned hardcore Freude-durch-KraftWagen should.

Open door, filter in, close door, then marvel at the quilted leather landscape that injects a Maybach touch of class to the suddenly sumptuous world of AMG. The level of craftsmanship astonishes, and so does the complexity of the operation that suggests that the post-Playstation generation is already in the market for this superpower CLS/S-class hybrid.