Mercedes-AMG E 63 S Estate Review: Life’s hectic at the moment. I’m running a farm, hosting three TV shows, writing newspaper columns, and I have a farm shop that now employs 35 people. Plus, I’m building a house that is seven months behind schedule and, simultaneously, rehousing my cows.
Seriously fast: the Mercedes-AMG E 63 S Estate. Featured Image: Justin Leighton
All of which means it’s very easy to simply not notice when someone drops off a press demonstrator car. And that’s exactly what happened a couple of weeks ago when a man from Hyundai came to collect a car, I didn’t know I had. I don’t even know what colour it was. So, I’m afraid I can’t review it for you today. Mercifully I happened to be in the farmyard, badger-proofing the cow barn while hosting a Zoom call, when I saw the new Mercedes-AMG E 63 S estate being dropped off. And since then, I have driven it a lot, wearing a groove in the M40 on a series of trips to and from meetings in London. Perhaps that’s why I tested negative for Covid again this morning. It can’t catch up with me.
In some ways this Mercedes is a very good car. The boot is huge – with the rear seats folded it offers up more than 1800 litres of volume. And it’s not like they’ve created such a cavern by making the exterior boxy. It’s actually quite a handsome car, especially with its new wider tyres. Then there’s the engine. I miss the American nature of AMG’s early V8s. That lazy burble that, when you prodded the accelerator, became an uncouth roar. I also liked the way the drivetrain could never really handle the titanic power, which meant you went everywhere slightly sideways. They were fun cars and over the years I owned three of them.
Today, though, we live in different times and this kind of ostentatious consumption of rubber is deemed to be antisocial. So, the engines have been turbocharged and quietened down. It’s a shame, but don’t worry too much because, behind the sober suit, the beast is still there, and the power is still ferocious. This is still a seriously fast car. It flows, too, gliding beautifully through the bends with the grace and poise of an owl. And it’s comfortable, unless you put it in race mode, which will cause you to be sitting very quickly in a puddle of your own faeces.
And that, I’m afraid, is the end of the good news, because in every other way the new E was extremely annoying. The first problem came as I was moving my seat forward so that my girlfriend Lisa, who’s 187cm, could get in the back. “Oh feck,” she squealed. “I’ve torn my trousers.” Hurriedly she got back out and spun round, asking if the tear was visible. It was. Very. And because her entire buttock was exposed, I didn’t notice that my seat was still moving forwards. I jabbed at the button, but nothing would stop it and pretty soon I looked like Stanley Tucci towards the end of The Core.
Later on in the week I noticed that the seat heater would come on for a few minutes and then turn itself off. That was annoying too. Nearly as annoying as the lane departure warning system coming on every time the car was started. Which meant I had to use the stupidly ill-conceived trackpad system to turn it off.
Worse than all this, though, was the differential, which caused the front wheels to judder alarmingly when parking or manoeuvring at low speeds. I’ve encountered this fault before in other cars and usually it goes away when the diff is warm. But in the Merc, it was constant.
Then, in a traffic jam on the A40, everything went wrong at once. Every single light on the dash started flashing, and there are a lot of them. It was like being at a Pink Floyd gig inside the cockpit of a crashing airliner. And I couldn’t read the messages on the screen because I didn’t have my spectacles, so I simply turned the engine off and then on again. Naturally this fixed it. But for how long? Who knows? I didn’t drive the car at all after that. I didn’t trust it.
As a general rule press demonstrator cars are fastidiously maintained by a team of in-house technicians, so it is extremely rare for one to develop a fault. And yet here was a Mercedes that, in just five days, developed four. And even if the seat-motor issue turns out to have been caused by the distraction of Lisa’s bottom, it’s still three. And that’s too many in any car, let alone a luxury Mercedes-Benz.
MERCEDES-AMG E 63 S ESTATE
ENGINE: 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 (450kW/850Nm). Average fuel 12.3 litres per 100km
TRANSMISSION: Nine -speed automatic, all-wheel drive
PRICE: £101,495 (estate wagon, pictured, n/a Australia; sedan from $253,900)
STARS: 3 out of 5
