cars Mercedes C63 AMG Performance
Is the c63 AMG so good, that it's preventing me from having my well deserved "mid-life crisis".
Did Mercedes Benz really make a car SO GOOD, that you really don't need anything else? I take a look at why this icon might be all the car you ever need!
So first up, and to qualify this post, I am officially 2 year's into mid-life crisis territory! My hairline has started heading for the horizon, my waistline is heading in the opposite direction, I have started to browse convertibles, and I am almost ready to press go on a poor man's Porsche of some description. So all in all, I would say I am about ready and qualified to begin my journey into the next phase.
Over the last few week's (months actually, but shhh), after adding go faster Edition 1 looking stripes to the C63 AMG Estate, I have been having some moments. Those moments when you start to consider what your midlife crisis car should be and when you should actually get it. For context, home for me contains my partner and my 5 year old son, so despite having the family car (which I am no allowed to touch, swap, part ex, sell, pawn, or do anything that will mean its no longer outside our house), my midlife crisis kinda needs to take into account the current situation. Or so I thought.... For 2 days back, after drawing my partners attention to a nice white 911 4S, she actually said, well, you can get whatever car you want as we have the family car anyway! It was like god came down to earth and planted the words on her lips. :)
Well, far be it for me to decline an opportunity to do some online window (doors, steering wheel, seats and engine) shooooooopping!
And so it began...
SUVs - No usually the place to start a midlife crisis, but I have a thing for fast SUVs. Just the high seating position, the comfort and the kick-ass performance...gets me every time. So I checked out the GLE 63 S as my usual go to. Then the GLC 63, which I still don't understand why I hate. Then came the Macan's (GTS and Turbo), the GTS which I owned for all of 5 minutes and couple of year's back and still don't feel like that chapter has closed. One by one the SUVs fell. Aside from the fact that the prices have been massively hiked up during the pandemic, when I started to compare each of them to the mighty C63, they started to fall! Too big, too slow, too sloppy. The C63 came out on top every time, with the practicality and comfort to match any mid-sized SUV on the market. Strike 1!
Performance Coupes - Next up was the small, fast, performance coupes. The Cayman is a car that has been weighing heavily on my mind for some time and when the Cayman GT4 arrived, I thought that this is it. My time had come. By manual. hmmm... I'm not doing manual, doesn't matter how amazing the car is! But wait, a new GTS with the same 4.0 (detuned) engine the sits inside the mighty Cayman GT4. Surely this is it. £80k plus. hmmm... Can I really say that I will be getting £30k more car than I get with the C63. Well both have a 4.0 litre engine, which is a good start. But somehow, Mercedes have managed to bolt an extra 2 cylinders and push our over 100 additional hp. So If I get this straight, for my extra cash, I get the same displacement, less power, less seats, less boot and less options. Sure the Cayman would out perform the C63 on a track any day of the week. But West London is running short of tracks at the moment and from an everyday driving perspective, the C63 still delivers. Every time I drive it I smile, and that's in Comfort mode. In sport, I giggle, and in sport plus, the devil literally leaps out of me and takes the wheel. I just can't fault the car (rain excluded). Behind the Cayman was the cracking TTRS, the SL 63 and a few other very good GT cars. But again, each one fell to the sheer power, poise and excitement provided by the AMGs super Estate.
Convertibles - A crisis wouldn't be a crisis if I didn't explore all the convertible options available to me as part of this journey. Yes the SL63 was on the list. Looked at the Porsche Boxster (for a real crisis), the C63 convertible, the SLK, the TTRS convertible and a few others. All have their pros and cons, but with the exception of the TTRS, I couldn't find anything within a reasonable budget, that would allow me to get anywhere near the speed and overall balanced performance offered by the C63 Estate. At this point, I was really trying, and even did some calculations on the SL. You get a lot of bang for your buck for sure. But just couldn't tip me over to the dark side.
Conclusions - So shamefully, the closest I got to fulfilling my duty to buy something impractical and crisis'y was the C63 AMG Coupe. Yes sad I know, given that its literally the same car I have already! But also a testament to a magnificent piece of engineering by the men and women of Mercedes-AMG. I will get to my midlife crisis at some point I am sure, but for now I feel like I can be the 4X year old hooligan with go faster stripes! But at the same time, I can also do the school run, a full week of shopping, do the weekend dump runs, and blow most of the cars I was dribbling over, out of the water!!
Food for thought :)
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