Famously shouty follow-up to a legend - but is AMG's G-wagen as bulletproof as it looks?
Although many couldn’t quite believe it, the second-generation Mercedes-AMG G63 was launched in January 2018 at the Detroit show. Why was it so hard to believe? Well, by that point Mercedes’s Geländewagen had been around in essentially unchanged form for nearly forty years, after being introduced in 1979 as a military vehicle and then turning into an alternative to the Land Rover that had been chugging around war zones and other road-free parts of the world for the previous thirty years.
In this guide, we’re going to focus on the 2018-on G63 powered by the M176 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8. Built by hand at the Magna Steyr plant in Graz, Austria, the gen-two G63 was wider, taller and longer than its predecessor. Most of its extra length was between the front crumple zone and the rigid chassis to get the car through upcoming pedestrian safety regs.
The G-Class has been wooing a certain demographic since AMG jumped onto it in 1999 and to this day they still attract customers, some of whose work you might not entirely approve of. The normal, or you might think hackneyed, G63 ‘look’ is tints, dark exteriors and eye-popping interiors, topped off with a perched stance on 22-inch wheels wearing rubber-band tyres.
Annual road tax in the UK is £600. You won’t see dealer servicing prices online but we’ve seen independents apparently quoting £260 for the A service and £380 for the B, which seems almost suspiciously reasonable. In this version, AMG magically managed to work real improvements into the car’s road manners without losing the G-Wagen’s off-road abilities.
There have been reports of leaky seals on early low-mile cars, both the rear main and others connected with the steering apparatus. This resulted in either unsightly stains on your driveway or in noxious clouds of white smoke caused by liquid dropping onto hot exhausts. Owners who put 24-inch wheels and 33-inch tyres on their G63 often noticed that there was some rubbing and extra harshness to the ride. Ah well. At 2.
The design of the LED headlights was a nice nod to the style of the original G-Wagen. There could be whistles at speed that was at first thought to be down to the air con side vent because the whistles stopped when you turned the AC off. In fact, it was almost always a faulty window seal that would generate noise when the airflow through the car was changed by turning the AC on. These seals were fixed under warranty.
The digital instrumentation was superb as was the surround-view camera. The top-down ‘drone’ view was very handy for wheel protection when you were negotiating width restrictors, branches and/or rocks. There was more than a hint of E-Class or even S-Class about many of the parts used, lending the cabin a much more opulent air than had been the case previously.
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