The 2025 Mercedes-AMG GT 63 S E-Performance 4-Door Coupe is … a very long name. It also represents a rare but successful melding of two ideas that are usually mutually exclusive: a halo car, and a flagship. For all the flack we’ve given Mercedes’ recent spate of products, we mean this with a great deal of earnestness: they absolutely nailed it here.
Halo cars and flagships occupy similar spaces—the upper echelons of the brands they represent—but their mission statements vary a good bit. Halo cars typically push the limits of performance and engineering, which is why they typically take the form of supercars and sports cars. They’re also usually prohibitively expensive and already sold-out by the time the covers come off, so most mortals can only ever dream of getting up close and personal to these cars.
On the other hand, flagships typically put luxury and opulence above most everything else. The mission statement of something like an S-Class, for example, is to showcase the very best of Mercedes-Benz design, craftsmanship, and sheer opulence, rather than outright performance and speed. But despite the obvious differences in intent and execution, flagships and halo cars are more alike than you think. They’re both often our first tastes of new, cutting-edge tech and engineering. That’s why you see the most advanced powertrains, the latest driver assists, and the most clever engineering and manufacturing tricks applied in the high-end stuff first, before trickling down the lineup.
The Mercedes-AMG GT 63 E-Perf—screw it, I’m referring to it as the ‘four-door GT 63’ from here on out—embodies all these traits. It no doubt looks the part of a halo car, with wide hips and a sinuous silhouette drenched in satin blue paint, all tied together by a perma-scowl up front and a deployable rear wing out back. Rolling on blacked-out 21-inch mesh wheels with massive carbon-ceramic brakes and bright gold calipers peeking out from out back, there’s an unmistakable, head-turning presence to the four-door GT 63, losing nothing to its two-door counterpart.
The four-door GT 63 looks and feels the part inside, too. As positively sumptuous as the S-Class is, it’s not totally impervious to our seemingly never-ending points of contention endemic to newer Benzes—going heavy-handed with screens, tech, and gentlemens’ club-inspired ambient lighting at the expense of questionable fit-and-finish and ergonomics. Here, the four-door GT 63 is a generation behind, but this works to its advantage as it does in other ‘old-but-new’ Benzes like the G-Wagen and GLS 580.
To wit: there’s no massive, portrait-oriented touchscreen tacked onto the centre stack, or Hyperscreen dominating the dashboard. There’s no mass explosion of gloss black trim by default to cheapen the look. There’s no mass culling of physical switchgear and smart-but-basic ergonomics for the sake of tech-driven minimalism. By all accounts, this four-door GT 63 is their “old” layout, retaining the tastefully integrated double-screen layout. In Mercedes’ new-new stuff, the main focal point is the big screen tacked onto the dash; here in the four-door GT 63, you notice the gorgeous materials and finishes, the solidity, and the inexplicable sense of niceness you’d expect from something bearing the three-pointed star before anything else.
Yet not once did the four-door GT 63 come across as outdated. The two-tone black-on-ice-white colourway looks chic, every piece of leather is buttery, every thread of contrast stitching is tight, and despite the occasional rattle—the four-door GT 63 isn’t totally impervious to our complaints with New Mercedes—every surface you grip, poke, and maybe even caress feels solid. Both displays—the highly customizable digital gauge cluster, and the MBUX-powered infotainment—are crisp and responsive, and MBUX’s voice controls are as natural and smart as ever. If tapping and swiping is more your jam, you can interact with MBUX through the touchscreen—or a trackpad on the centre console, because it’s still “old” Mercedes in here.
Granted, I did come away with a few minor nitpicks inside the four-door GT 63’s environment. It’s impossible to get into (and out of) this thing gracefully; the low-cut roofline means you’re ducking a lot to get in, and there’s a pretty good chance you’ll clock your head a few times until it becomes muscle memory. Once you’re in, the cool-looking centre console runs through the cabin like a spine, but it’s very wide; it doesn’t offer much storage up front and eats up a lot of knee room no matter where you sit. Once you’re back there, though, shorter drives are cramped but doable, plus everything you grip, poke, and maybe even caress feels as nice as it does up front.
Where the four-door AMG GT very successfully marries the ideas of a halo car and a flagship is its powertrain. It uses a similar plug-in hybrid setup as the S 63 E Performance, borrowing tech and engineering tricks Mercedes learned through its Formula One efforts—in other words, the race-car engineering you’d expect in any self-respecting, road-going halo car. It starts with Mercedes-AMG’s familiar, handbuilt twin-turbo 4.0-litre V8 engine, rated at 630 horsepower, 664 pound-feet of torque, and paired to a nine-speed automatic transmission. Hardly lacking, but teamed to a 6.1 kWh battery pack and a rear-mounted electric motor—the latter of which pitching in another 94 ponies, or 201 in its 10-second Boost mode—you’re looking at a grand total of 831 horsepower and 1,084 pound-feet of torque.
There’s a lot more going on here than meets the eye. First off, that rear electric motor is hilariously tiny by today’s standards, resulting in a hilariously tiny electric-only range of—well, I don’t know. Mercedes-Benz doesn’t quote an official number, but the feds estimate 18 kilometres. Our real-world experience lines up to that—a far cry from the ability to commute to your C-suite job and reserved parking spot without burning a drop of gas, as you would in PHEVs like the S 580e. The four-door GT 63 practically didn’t even need a plug of any kind, let alone one in a very unfortunate location. That or Mercedes has one heck of a sense of humour.
Consequently, here in the four-door GT 63, the electric end is less about range, and more about going really fast. Mercedes says the battery is developed by High Performance Powertrains, a UK-based company that builds F1 engines, and uses a similar energy storage system as their hybrid F1 cars. In a nutshell, it’s much lighter, handles higher temperatures and hard driving better, and replenishes (and depletes) its charge much faster than a conventional battery. The electric motor also uses a two-speed transmission; with Mercedes-AMG’s tweaked 4Matic+ all-wheel-drive system and a rear limited-slip diff on board for when the gas engine is pitching in, everything about this car is damn near instantaneous and imperceptible.
In other words, it’s really fast and you almost don’t even know it. Unlike its electric-only range, Mercedes is all too keen to point out the four-door GT 63 teleports from zero to 100 km/h in 2.9 seconds, well on its way to a 317 km/h top speed. I didn’t verify these figures, as I generally prefer to keep my licence in good standing, but I can confirm the four-door GT 63 undoubtedly drives like a halo car should. Its straight-line speed is face-melting, there’s heaps of grip even on Michelin all-season tires, and the boosted V8 sounds more ferocious than the S 63 plug-in. It also drives like a modern AMG would: the ride is stiff, the nine-speed automatic occasionally fires off a rough shift, and it’s heavy. Everyone complains the latest M5’s weight gain is terrible, no good, and very bad, but they also seem to have forgotten that the four-door GT 63—which arrived first—also weighs nearly 5,300 pounds. Nevertheless, like the new M5, the GT 63 hides it well.
Ah, the M5. That reminds me: at $214,500 to start and $255,245 as-tested, the price of admission for this plug-in hybrid, four-door GT 63 isn’t insignificant. Whether it’s too much money depends on what you consider to be pocket change, so let’s throw some numbers out there and you can decide for yourself. The non-hybrid, four-door GT 63—with only 577 horsepower and an egregious zero-to-100 km/h run of 3.4 seconds—starts at $195,000, and if you really like the look but don’t need maximum performance, the GT 53 should scratch that itch. And if you want to do the bloody fast plug-in thing, the M5 does the job for nearly a hundred grand less.
But then again, what else out there toes the line between halo car and flagship like the 2025 Mercedes-AMG GT 63 S E-Performance 4-Door Coupe does? It thrills you like a hypercar, it coddles you like a flagship S-Class, and it plugs in because that’s very much the in-thing these days. Best of all, it doesn’t make the same frustrating concessions like most other new Benzes do. There’s more to luxury—to cars, in general—than screens. Horsepower is a good substitution for that.
