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>> This made of car makes absolutely no sense, but that's okay. It's fun! Let's go for a run in the Mercedes C63 AMG. This is crazy!
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>> Normally we start these reports with the inventory of all the tech toys: the nav screen, the Bluetooth, the iPod connector -- screw that. We're in the C-class with a 6.2-liter V8. What am I stupid? Let's talk about the power, 451 horsepower, 443 foot-pounds of torque -- good grief. That all goes out through a 7-speed automatic -- yeah, but it's a hell of an automatic. The end result is a 0 to 60 squirt in 4.3 seconds. Here are our paddle shifters up here, down shift on the left, up shift on the right. All you got to do is slap a paddle and you get what you wanted, a down shift or an up shift. Here by the shifter is our three-mode button: Comfort, Sport, Manual. Now, in the comfort mode the car really does breathe a little less ambitious slate. Hit it again, you're in sport mode. Now the car is going to hold down those shifts better and it's gonna rev and retire and it seems to have some other little secret sauce going on in there, because the power really comes on like a fist in the small of your back. Hit it one more time and you go into the manual mode. Now, you're strictly on your own. Now when you snatch one of those gear shifts, like a double down shift there, the red matching Logic really kicks in and keeps everything happening quick and tight and fast like blips of throttle like the best of drivers -- I love that. You can compare the exhaust note of this car versus anything and I'll take this car. It has one of the great exhaust notes in a production car today. I mean, it's really ballsy, you get a nice tone out of it all the time, but it's never drumming in the cabin and it seems like it's always throttling. The brakes on this car are massive and quite advanced. You've got 6-spot calipers up front, four is on the rear. I don't know what size they are, but just looking through that 18-inch wheel, they take up a lot of space, so they're big. And this car comes with a base AMG sport seat, upper and lower lumbar and the bottom one down here, adjusts the side bolsters. One thing I can tell you is the widest position isn't all that wide. So, fat asses need not apply with this car. Okay, now on to the tech toy. That is a peeky-boo LCD system there. Hides behind this textured panel -- hello. That's a great display. Real bright, real sharp, nicely designed. That's an annoyance. This is one of those cars that doesn't let you do a damn thing while you're moving. Yeah, you trust me with 450 horsepower and 0 to 60 in 4.3, but you don't trust me to enter a destination -- that's stupid. What you can do while you're underway though is to grab destinations that are in-memory for example, so if I go back to my list of previous, I can hit that guide, start that up.
>> The route is being calculated.
>> Under the audio selections, we've got Sirius Satellite radio, AM, FM, no HD radio on this car, which is odd because Mercedes is kind of out there on that. Notice all the logos there. One of which tells us DVD videos available, not just DVD audio. And it's true, when this car is stopped, you can watch a movie on the front screen. Go to your audio disc like I have loaded here and not just play them, you can also rip them to your hard drive. Now it's a roughly modest amount of space. You have 4-gig of hard drive space available, out of a 40-gig total system. We have Gracenote media database built in, so if it can recognize the disc among the world of commercial discs, you'll have automatic field filling. Thankfully, our little Benz burner has Bluetooth phone connectivity. You know, it wasn't that long ago that a lot of Mercedes made you use a cradle. And over there on the glove box about 30 yards across the car where I can never reach it is our iPod harness. Now one down side all these rip, roaring, whisky, snorting power and performance is that it takes a little bit of gas lean to get it all up and going, 12/19 is your EPA mpg couplet -- gulp. Alright, let's price this fun little sedan. This kind of performance normally cost more than 56 -- that's pretty good. Especially for the kind of specs and numbers we are talking about here. Not in an enormously large amount of creature comforts inside, and I think it's a little gaudy on the outside, but that's my opinion. The options: $3,000 for the multi-media package, that includes the navigation system, which is hard drive based, so you get the 4-gig of hard drive space for your music as well, the beautiful interface, the PC card slot you'll never use, the upgraded Harmon Kardon audio. The other big ticket guys, the performance package for almost $4,000, steeper suspension, the more advanced brakes, the limited slip and the Alcantara interior. Oh, by the way, you probably gonna wanna add an iPod interface for 400 bucks a la carte.
