>> A lot of car makers over the years have described their more powerful vehicles as an iron fist in a velvet glove. Well if that's true, this must be an MP5 in a silk holster. I'm talking about the Mercedes Benz S63 AMG. Let's check the tech.
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>> Now inside this big gorgeous beast is one the greatest interfaces and displays in autodome, that 8-inch LCD. Look at the color. Look at the saturation. Look at the crispness and the nice info graphic design. It's just a winner. Well of course, navigation in a car of this category is standard as is a 20-gigabyte hard drive user accessible. Now I'm damned if I can figure out how to rift to it, but they promised it's in there. So check the review and we'll actually have that detailed for you. Your music input for auxiliary is over there in the glove box. You've got a set of aux jacks, but not the usual mini, you've got RCAs, yellow for video because you can bring a video portable up or just use the red and white for the audio. Oh, by the way, aside from auxiliary as a video source you can also play video DVDs. Other tech toys on this car of course you've got a rearview monitor. It's a great rearview monitor. Nice clarity and you've got guidelines on this Mercedes system to give you some idea of where your rear end really is, where the trajectory is on the perimeter of the vehicle. It's just a really well laid-out system that works very nicely. The other visual technology what I really think is trippy -- I don't like it. I just think it's trippy is over here. This little paddle button, which is Night View Assist. When you hit that, it gives you a night vision where the speedometer used to be because the speedometer is strictly a video screen. It's a very cool technology as a technology. It's very jarring to me to actually use it. I just can't go back and forth between road and screen and still maintain driving cognizance. One last piece of cabin tech I want to show you before we go to the power train and I've got to leave so many out, but this one is really cool. You hit the Seat button down here on the console, and here are your seat settings and you can move around to adjust the shoulders, the lumbar, the seat back side, the seat sides -- all of this stuff. But then you get to these two menus on the right. The Driving Dynamic Seat, which has three settings of how much it will curve in real-time to hold you in during hard cornering. It's a weird sensation. Once you get used to it, it's not bad. I think it's kind of frivolous, but especially in a car like this, but it's really cool. And then you get the Pulse Mode here, which is Mercedes' way of calling it a massage seat, from slow and gentle, all the way to fast and vigorous, and the very odd fast and gentle. Now the engine on this car like any AMG Mercedes is a big part of the story. Here it is, 6.3-liter V8, naturally aspirated, no turbos, or blowers of any kind. Hand-built of course, I know that because the guy's name is right there. I can't begin to pronounce that. Bottom line, 518 horsepower, 465 foot-pounds of torque, 0 to 60 in about 4.5-seconds in the big car. The downsides: 11, 17 are the MPG ratings. And the gas guzzler tax $3,000, but if you can afford this, who cares. Okay, let's price this big boy, 128 is the base. At least that includes delivery. Then some options you might want to consider include $2800 -- almost $2900 for the radar cruise control, the Distronic they call it. Another $2100 will get you the combination of the rearview camera and the Night Vision Assist -- that's kind of a steal. And then the last one that's really odd $7000 for an AMG performance upgrade. On top of everything else, 20-inch wheels are included and they de-limit the top speeds. You can go up to 186 they tell us. Have fun.