Although it appears like—and weighs as a lot as—a full-grown ocean solar fish, smells like melted crayons, encompasses a cabin suffering from sticky delaminating buttons, and was usually crammed, in interval, with bratty pre-tweens squirting one another with tubes of Go-Gurt and arguing over which Disney Channel DVD to play on their seatback screens, the Mercedes R63 has all the time held a uncanny attract to me.
Whereas I’m a childless city gay, I’ve made no secret of my affection for minivans, and have printed broadly on the topic, plumbing the depths of their weird design histories, corralling relenting worshipers of their flexibility, and overprizing their inventiveness and gadgetry. So when Mercedes-Benz supplied me the chance to drive their sidelong entry into the marginal class of hot-rod “sports activities tourer”—the 507hp, 6.3-liter naturally-aspirated V8-powered, all-wheel-drive, four-door, six-passenger 2007 R63—from LA to Pebble Seaside to kick off the annual automotive bacchanal often known as Monterey Automobile Week, I didn’t dither.
Like lobster ice cream, or indoor desert ski slopes, the R63 is an audacious and wondrously horrible concept. It’s practically not possible to think about the product planning assembly wherein the R63 was hatched, however its fundamental blueprint adopted the fundamental Affalterbach playbook: transplant the honkingest V8 doable into the engine bay, inoculate the chassis towards acute rejection, and stand again with a pilsner laughing on the doubtful outcomes.
As with fisting, simply because one thing larger can slot in there, doesn’t essentially imply it’ll deliver pleasure. Thankfully, contributors for each that act, and this automotive, are inclined to self-select. To that finish, the R63 was a special-order car, obtainable solely to those that had been courageous sufficient to ask their seller to construct them one. It price practically $90,000 in 2007 ($135,000 in as we speak’s cash), weighed 5,300 kilos when empty, and accelerated from 0-60 mph in 4.6 seconds on its technique to a prime pace of 155 mph. Solely 200 had been produced, globally, for one mannequin 12 months, and simply over 100 made it to the States, making it rarer than the CLK Black Sequence, or McLaren P1.
The drive from Los Angeles to Monterey could be among the many world’s most dreadful, or loveliest, route-dependent. I break up the distinction, avoiding the anodyne 5 that runs up California’s agro agricultural backbone, and taking the coast and mountain route, however then skipping the inevitable incoming visitors bathroom on Freeway 1 round Massive Sur. This gave me the chance to check the R63 within the twisties, in addition to its expertise as a freeway cruiser.
We’ll begin with the excellent news. This factor is fucking quick. With sure-footed 4MATIC all-wheel-drive, it’ll smoke a up to date V-10 M5 to 60 mph. And it pulls and pulls. On the freeway, maintaining your foot in it permits that scrumptious naturally aspirated V8 to indicate its legs like a gymnasium queen in 3” operating shorts. As a result of preponderance of CHiPs, looking for out exotics to ticket en-route to the MCW festivities, I didn’t try to succeed in V-max. However triple-digit blasts are easy, and the 7-speed transmission, and cozy sport seats, permits all-day prime gear cruising at California freeway speeds, which hover round 85 or 90 mph on the much less occupied stretches. We had been within the automotive for 7 hours and felt recent on arrival. Not new S-Class recent, however not in want of a chiropractor.
Furthermore, with out the ultra-raised seating place of an SUV—it’s a half-foot decrease than the 2007 ML63 crossover with which it shares its underpinnings—it’s straightforward to neglect that you simply’re in a long-roofed wagony-van type of factor, till you see everybody watching you mouthing, “What the fuck is that?” Massive brakes beneath 20” five-spoke wheels present greater than enough stopping energy. However this factor is lengthy and heavy. So it’s not precisely nimble. It’s comparatively flat round mild curves, however you possibly can readily really feel physics, and the dearth of many years of intervening Benz crossover chassis tuning, coming into play. A canyon carver, it isn’t.
It’s tough for my aged self to acknowledge that the mid-aughts occurred twenty years in the past. However the R63 jogs my memory of this in quite a few methods. There’s no Bluetooth. The one technique to plug in a telephone is through a brief corded 30-pin dock connecter within the glovebox. There are the aforementioned DVD screens mounted to the entrance seatbacks. And the nav system, whereas useful, is CD-based, one thing we realized, after the very fact, when it did not route us round a large visitors jam approaching the Monterey Peninsula. Duh.
“That is the type of automotive that, if you see one up on the market, it’s a must to purchase it,” a Mercedes Traditional Heart rep informed us. I might disagree, personally. There are many different automobiles, perhaps even different minivans, I would quite personal, first. However I might undoubtedly agree with one other assertion the identical rep made once we had been pumping this beast stuffed with $100 value of premium, an antidote to its 14 mpg freeway efficiency. “This automotive got here from a second within the firm that can by no means be repeated.” Bless the weirdos who considered it.
