I’m loath to pile on the 2024 Mercedes-AMG C63, because it seems Mercedes already can’t sell the things. But here we are. This latest UberMerc isn’t a bad car by any objective measure, but if we search our feelings as Vader once instructed, we know it to be true: The new C63 is not a great car either.
That’s a shame because every C63 that came before was great. Never a match for the BMW M3’s lap times or the Audi RS4’s visual presence, the C63 traded on attitude. AMG picked a shade of growling Stathamesque charisma and poured it on by the bucketload.
When a C63 rolled by, it left an impression. "Now there’s a car for a man with a scar on his face," you’d think. While I remember almost nothing about the last generations of M3 and Audi RS, I’ll never shake the memory of a twin-turbo C63 drifting wide up a Tennessee hairpin before swinging past the next apex. Even after it disappeared, you could hear that AMG mill wailing up the hillside for a country mile.
That’s what the C63 badge means. Why would Mercedes change the recipe?
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We’ll never get a straight answer. But surely the decision was driven by the EU’s efficiency demands, rather than an authentic tie to the Mercedes F1 program, some cogent business case, or as it was in the days when former CEO Tobias Moers ran AMG, genuine knuckle-dragger enthusiasm.
Determined not to give us the V-8, Mercedes delivered the C63 with a compact inline-four turbo mated to some motors and batteries. By all accounts, it’s a technical masterpiece. Our writer Chris Rosales did a lovely tech breakdown of the powertrain here, and it’s funny that reading about the C63’s technology can impart a sense of awe, but the driving experience doesn’t.
This hybrid C63 will simply stomp on almost anything it locks horns with, including the older generations, but it’s woefully heavy and dull to drive in context of the car’s own history. So rather than beat this C63’s lack of emotional appeal like the dead horse it is, let’s make a different case.
The new C63 should’ve been an EV.
First, a practical argument: Mercedes moved metaphorical mountains to cram both a snorty turbo four and a plug-in hybrid system into the current C-Class.
Fallout from those packaging decisions means you just can’t fit much of anything inside this mid-size sedan. My son’s stroller, for example, won’t fit in the C63’s trunk. That’s unacceptable.
That dearth of space comes courtesy of the hybrid system’s 196-pound, 6.1-kilowatt-hour battery pack, which sits above the rear axle. It’s a small battery by modern standards, but one that deducts a huge amount of vertical trunk space. Trunk volume drops less than three cubic feet, from 12.6 to 9.8 cubes, but most of that space is lost by the trunk floor raising to accommodate the battery.
It means you can’t squeeze a folded-up stroller inside the trunk, which in turn means you have to wedge that stroller and its soggy, dirty wheels behind the driver’s seat and whoops there’s wet clay and grass over your gorgeous leather interior. To stick with a turbo-four plug-in hybrid, Mercedes sacrificed practicality on the altar of performance. But did they have to?
The Bavarians offer a counterpoint. Take the BMW i4, which sat in my driveway just a week earlier than the Benz. In M50 guise, the i4 hits 60 mph in a scant 3.3 seconds. That nearly matches the Mercedes’s frankly batshit 2.9-second time, but by the quarter-mile mark, the cars are neck and neck. The Bimmer’s a half-second behind but with the same trap speed.
While the straight-line performance of the two cars is close-but-not-equal, it’s a dead heat on the skidpad (right around 1.00 g). But, the i4 is massively more spacious on the inside, offering an airier cabin for drivers and passengers, plus seven more cubic feet of cargo volume (thanks to a fastback design), while the i4 has smaller measurements in every exterior dimension.
Cargo space isn’t the sexiest thing to hang an argument on, but we expect practicality even from our super sedans. If the C63 aims to deliver so much performance with so little emotion— weighed down by an EV’s curb weight and far more mechanical complexity—it begs the question, what if the C63 were an EV instead?
Mercedes’s EV lineup could use the excitement. Its current EV spread consists of some of the most dour and uninspired sedans in the segment. The EQE is a prime example. It’s designed both inside and outside to look sleek and inoffensive, a coated aspirin gel on wheels. If only its detached driving dynamics could dull the pain of its forgettable design.
A C63 EV could’ve jolted Mercedes’s electric lineup to life. Instead of adhering to the same low-drag mold that half of the market’s EV sedans seemingly slip from, imagine walking from the grocery store doors and seeing a C63, but this one happens to be an EV. Imagine that car’s Lucid-conquering performance, the presence of its brutish visual charm, but without having to explain what the hell is a Lucid Air?! at the neighborhood pickleball tournament.
In an era when every single Mercedes EV beyond the G-Class looks anonymous, the C63’s design still evokes the best of Mercedes-AMG’s ideals. It’s quiet but confident, elegant but menacing, and compelling in all the ways you expect the most-badass C-Class to be. The BMW i4 proves that a C-Class-shaped midsize sedan could accommodate batteries and increase livability for its passengers, as well as nailing the performance prerequisites.
Would a synthetic V-8 rumbling through the speakers sound better than the C63s anodyne soundtrack? Maybe. Or maybe not. But at least you could keep your C63’s interior from getting smeared by muddy stroller tires and, well, it couldn’t sound worse than an EQE.
