Pigeon-holers, give up now
In 1978 The Who posed the question, ‘Who are you?’, and it blasts from the GT 4 Door’s Burmester speakers as the AMG and I begin the climb into the Peak District. It’s an appropriate question for the Mercedes-AMG GT 4 Door, a car that’s caused no little puzzlement since it was announced.
In name it’s an extension of the two-door, two-seat AMG GT. In the metal it’s rather different. While the two-seat GT uses aluminium chassis architecture derived from 2010’s SLS, the GT 4 Door is altogether bigger, built using the newer, more versatile but heavier platform shared by most of Merc’s rear-driven passenger cars, including the E-Class and the CLS.
It’s the CLS that this car has most in common with. The CLS range for the UK now tops out with the straight-six mild-hybrid AMG CLS 53,
leaving a gap where the previous generation had the mighty V8-powered CLS 63. Mercedes hates a microscopic gap in its range like nature abhors a vacuum – so up steps the GT 4 Door. It beats the CLS for visual drama, and has the muscle to live up to the looks: 577bhp from AMG’s rip-snorting 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 in the GT 63, or 630bhp in the 63 S variant tested here. That makes it the most powerful Mercedes currently on sale.
So it’s not a stretched AMG GT sports car, and nor is it a modified CLS, although it looks a bit like one from a distance, and has similar underpinnings. A hair-splitter might also suggest it has five doors rather than four if you count its top-hinged tailgate hatch. Whatever it is, it’s heading for the same high-end, high-speed, passenger-friendly territory the Porsche Panamera currently occupies (as will the upcoming Audi RS7 and BMW M8 Gran Coupe). And, I’m discovering, it’s tremendously good fun.
As it devours the Derbyshire lanes through its shark-like grille with a lip-smacking belch on every upshift, the Merc’s driving position certainly feels more like to a saloon car than a low-slung GT car. A relatively high-set vantage point, it makes up in vision what it lacks in sportiness. You sit behind Mercedes’ now familiar layout of two giant glossy digital screens, above a swoopy dash peppered with turbine-style climatecontrol vents, with integrated LEDs that chameleon their way from blue to red as the temperature climbs. Further ambient lighting illuminates the cabin like a coral reef by night, with 64 colours to choose from. It’s a real statement interior, one right on the cusp of glamour and gaudiness. The screens are controlled by touch-sensitive pads on the centre console and the steering-wheel spokes. The interface becomes more intuitive
with time but the first few hours can be infuriating until you’re fluent.
Conversely, the GT 4 Door’s handling makes you feel instantly at ease. By rights a car more than five metres long and with more power than a McLaren F1 ought to be a right royal handful, but the GT feels smaller than it is. That’s partly thanks to all-wheel steering helping it into tight corners (and parking spaces), all-wheel drive on the way out of them and the machinations of the active suspension to take care of everything in the middle. The rear wheels are permanently driven, and an electro-mechanical clutch brings the fronts into play when required. Exactly when that is, and with exactly how much torque, is constantly adjusted on the fly. The system feels seamless in action. Feeling all four 20-inch Michelins hooking up to tear at the tarmac out of tight corners is quite a sensation. If you prefer sideways to forwards momentum the S features the same Drift mode as the AMG E63, which turns the car purely rear-driven and disables traction control.
Four-wheel steering means you rarely need to move your hands on the comfortable, chunky steering wheel. Hugely responsive, it requires barely any lock for all but the tightest of turns. It doesn’t feel entirely natural at first, but you quickly dial into it, helped by satisfyingly weighty resistance off centre. One of its spokes wears a plastic clickwheel control like a rosette. That’s the Dynamic Select wheel, which scrolls through the GT’s various driving modes (very much like the Panamera’s mode control). With every click the digital graphic on the wheel shape-shifts; a C for Comfort, for example, through to a chequered flag in ultimate Race mode, and there are yet further options in the media screen ⊲
In the upper echelons of its drive modes the AMG’s body control and steering response
are quite something
to tailor the amount and type of electronic intervention from Basic to Advanced and the flattering-sounding Pro and Master modes.
Each combination of settings changes the interaction between the suspension, all-wheel-drive system, electronic rear differential (standard on the S) and rear-wheel steering. Take the time to work through them and the breadth of the GT 4 Door’s dynamic talents becomes clear; in the upper echelons of its driving modes, its body control and steering response are quite something. A two-tonne car that steers with this level of precision, and with so little bodyroll, is hugely impressive.
The Panamera’s steering, by contrast, is less speedy in response but similarly accurate and with more natural-feeling feedback. Subjectively, the Alpina’s variable-ratio electromechanical steering is the least feelsome of the three, perhaps tuned with high-speed stability in mind, but it’s still a quick rack that requires few turns on these twisting roads.
The AMG’s three-chamber adaptive air suspension rides large bumps smoothly (more so than the heavier Porsche) but the smallest lumps ripple through the car, rattling the trim and fittings. I turn up Townshend to compensate, by nudging the volume control on the gigantic console on top of the transmission tunnel. Like the Dynamic Select wheel, its switches are animated with cartoon symbols that alter when pressed; it’s not subtle.
Four fixed seats are standard; a fold-down Business console is an option, as is a folding three-person rear bench. Despite the coupe-style roofline, there’s headroom for a six-foot passenger behind a six-foot driver. The GT 4 Door is about six inches taller than the two-door GT, which makes it look awkward from some angles. It has all the coupe cues (if your definition of coupe stretches to this many doors) but looks like a saloon car wearing GT drag. In some ways it’s an elegant design, with smooth, unadorned surfaces, in others it’s gauche, with false vents in its flanks and those big grilles up front.
AMG’s 4.0-litre V8, which sites its twin turbos in the valley of its vees, is now familiar from a host of Mercs (and Aston Martins) but this is its most potent form yet. With no less than 663lb ft on tap from 2500rpm, the V8’s midrange urge is intense, and the 4 Door feels every bit as fast as its on-paper figures suggest. Not even its hefty kerbweight can blunt the sheer relentlessness of its acceleration. The nine-speed transmission does an admirable job of coping, and while it can occasionally feel slow to dispatch successive downshifts, it can be forgiven considering the amount of twist involved.
Who are you, GT 4 Door GT? Behind the wheel, I quickly cease to care about its confounding image; I’m too busy enjoying myself. ⊲