Gadgetory

well you know it's the era of having it all isn't it and Mercedes apparently agrees with this cls63 you've got AMG power and good fuel economy you've got saucy coupe lines and a door for every passenger it's a statement and an exercise in conspicuous consumption let's drive this 2013 CLS 63 with the AMG Performance Package and check the tach first of all of CLS even before it becomes an AMG car is kind of an exercise and very expensive Swiss Army knife making everything is rammed into one package all those attributes we just talked about and they do a pretty good job of it but from the outside you might never guess this car is based on an e class the very different look on the exterior and the massing and the proportions of it it's also gonna fool you on the inside where you'll find there is no such thing as a basic CLS 63 as you might imagine everything in here is top drawer the materials are phenomenal it's a little on the guilded side for my tastes certainly compared to the very businesslike cockpit of a BMW or an Audi and as you can see you're surrounded by a forest of controls let's get into a few of them starting with this command controller here this is classic Mercedes stuff operating an interface that we've seen fairly consistently before there's a ribbon on the top there's sort of what I would call your content in the middle and then there's another ribbon of settings or options on the bottom that's the Mercedes interface now if you go to this globe icon in the far right that's where the internet stuff lives check it out we've got a web browser it's not much a1 it's a clunky thing to use because obviously it's not touchscreen it's a German car after all more useful of the mercedes-benz apps and I use more with quotes around it I'm not a big fan of this app suite which is playing catch-up right now its competitors have been doing apps longer Mercedes needs another Rev I think to really get this right the first issue you can see right there man this thing is slow to get a data connection once it does here's what you'll get Google local search is the most useful thing here on its face you've also got Yelp Facebook news and this one's new my mercedes-benz financial services you can pay your car payment from here the local search again long long pause to buffer between these things man it'll kill you and you can search near you or along the router some other city imagine typing that in at this tedious terminology now once they get my Google local search results there nicely ranked according to some logic it's clearly not by distance I don't even want to try and find the menu to change that you do have Google Street View and panoramio stills from the community you'd like to look at and this theme goes on through these different apps the other one I want to show you is Facebook first of all right why Facebook in the car and when the car is moving you can't do much with it which is fine with me except you can do a couple things while driving for example you can look at your events people have invited you to check out the details and RSVP to them but you can't do anything with walls or news now once you leave the interface on the head unit which as I've shown you is kind of hit and miss you get to some more hit and miss down here with the drive line controls I think it's excessive complication the shifter starts off with a park button but everything else is a shifter detent I'm not being on those two different kinds of behaviors to do the same thing which is control the drive line once you're in park and you want to come out you do one little detent and it up straight to neutral you cannot go to reverse without then going to detents the other way why is that and then it's a couple more detents down to drive so you never know if it's one or two detents and for some reason you got to skip reverse on your way out of park made me nuts over here is your personality knob for your powertrain C is I call it comfort they call it controlled performance or something Sport Sport+ and manual only what this is going to do is sharpen up throttle response rpm holding speed of shifts by this automated transmission a whole variety of power delivery programs down here would be normally considered a traction control defeat but they actually define it as a sport mode down here this controls your adaptive suspension which is not just shocks but also anti-sway technology to keep this guy flat as well as to firm up damper response three modes on that and then you've got an AMG button which you just simply press and hold to memorize whatever you've done with everything else it's basically like a radio preset for the drivetrain and suspension sure it's ideal if you're the very serious aggressive driver who really dials a car in specifically but if you're doing that do you do it at a forty 200-pound four-door sedan that makes no sense now once you open the extremely wide opening hood on this cls63 at nice mercedes service thing you find a big ol motor under here the 63 tells you nothing on the tail because up front we have a 5.5 liter v8 with a turbo on each bank we have that AMG performance package you know it because you see a carbon-fiber cover here that means we have 560 horse 590 foot-pounds of torque crazy numbers all of that gets just 4200 pound car up to sixty and four and a half seconds or a few tenths less because we got the performance package goes out to a 7-speed rear-wheel drive only now this is a 13 the 2014 car gets big changes first of all the AMG performance numbers becomes more or less the base power numbers the transmission goes to a 7-speed dual-clutch automated manual and they're gonna get all-wheel-drive in the mix so it's a very different car for 2014 just FYI now all of this weight speed and displacement should edit with some horrendous mpg figures but it doesn't 16:25 the epa rating on this guy i have driven cars much slower that use a lot more fuel that's pretty impressive but now the real funs of this vehicle what are Emanuele let's drop down a couple years let's hit it Wow this car has locomotive power I mean just crazy power as you can imagine from those numbers and that kind of engine architecture however I never found this car to really feel sharp powerful and sharper two different things as cars definitely the former but every shift in every mode feels a little bit laggy to me certainly even Sport Plus was a surprise and that it's kind of a sleep of the switch to my particular taste of interval I found myself getting on the paddles a lot but not because I wanted to because I had to cuz the chef's programming was letting me down there we go another one where was caught flat-footed it had to unbury itself from like seventh at 55 miles an hour this car is always trying to go along it like 1500 rpm to save fuel but the programming just bothers me sometimes so instead this is a great car for the long trip boulevard cruising maybe a roads got a little bit of sneaking to it but if you want to take this car out and toss it around on one of those more fun smaller twisty roads it's not gonna make you as happy to say a BMW 640i grand coupe which has a much lighter on its feet nature of course all that can be forgotten when you drop it into third just step on it okay let's price our 2013 CLS 63 this guy goes out of about ninety eight six bass and that doesn't include the AMG Performance Package that hotter engine that's gonna add seventy three hundred dollars part of that goes to that carbon fibre cover we'll never know how much a package of all the driver assist technologies active blind spot Lane Departure and adaptive cruise is a little under three grand all in you've bitten off about a hundred and eight thousand dollars worth of I want to have it all it is all here it's not the best execution on a lot of the technology and it's not the kind of driving experience you may be looking for but if you want power elegance practicality and prestige there's a lot to see here you