I Never Knew Pure Terror Until I Drove A Mercedes-AMG G63 At Speed

To my friend and neighbour Chris, I would like to say sorry. I realise now that shouting ‘OH GOD!’ mid way through a fast right-hander probably didn’t fill you with confidence while riding shotgun in that bright orange Mercedes-AMG G63. Especially as I was frantically hacking away at the steering wheel at the time. Judging by how white you looked after this brief but terrifying moment, you did not take kindly to it.

In reality, of course, we were fine. That’s the problem with the outgoing Mercedes G-Class - the steering wheel feels like it’s not actually attached to anything. There’s a sense of total disconnect with the front wheels, and also a worrying delay between your inputs and the car actually reacting with them. This decades-old, military-minded SUV still has a ladder chassis and solid rear axles, so the last thing it needs is a 544bhp, 5.5-litre twin-turbo V8. And yet here we are.

It’s not just the vagueness, either. The steering just seems to want to do its thing much of the time - you even find yourself chopping away at the wheel just to keep it in a straight line under full load. And even with a kerb weight of over two tonnes, it’s still fast - 0-62mph happens in just 5.4 seconds, and if you’re brave enough, you can take it up to an electronically-limited top speed of 143mph. I’m fine thanks, though.

Yes, you can take it down a country road and drive it hard, but doing so feels…alarming. Putting your foot down sees the G-Wag rear up like a horse, soon thrusting you to speeds that feel uncomfortable thanks to that vague steering and wayward front-end.

Get too greedy with the throttle, and the vast, boxy nose of the thing will happily wash wide. But we’re not talking about run-of-the-mill understeer here - the tall, heavy G63 feels as though it will understeer off the road, through a field and obliterate that delightfully quaint farm house just off to the right.

By pretty much any measure, the G63 is not a good car. It houses a vast V8 it was never designed for. Even on a gentle motorway run it’s amusingly incapable of hitting anything more than about 18mpg, and thanks to those side exit exhausts, you can’t really take it off road either. I’m not sure who or what it’s for, but you need to be very rich to buy one: even before options, it’s an absurd £152,600.

And yet, even though I shouldn’t, I really rather like it. There’s something brilliantly silly about the whole idea. It shouldn’t exist, and yet it does, here to raise a smile from whoever drives it and whoever spots it out in the wild. Particularly if - like the one I drove - it’s an orange ‘colour edition’.

Driving a G63 isn’t something you’ll forget in a hurry. But it’s not just the way it drives - I love having to step up into it; I love the industrial-spec doors and boot that have to be slammed shut with a satisfying ‘thunk’. It’s basically a life-size Tonka toy that has no clue about the word ‘subtlety’.

But what I love most about it? That’d be the fact Mercedes has made the new one look pretty much the same, only with proper independent front suspension and a load of tech lifted from the S-Class. So, Chris, when I take you out in that car, it should be a little less scary.