Seeing all the news about Mild Hybrid based V6 replacing the V8 Biturbo in the next generation C63, I decided it was time to get the V8 when I had the chance and hence pulled the trigger.

I was planning to initially go with a MY 2020 custom order. After looking at the Dealer Order Guide for MY2020, I did not find much differences for C63S MY2019 vs MY2020. There was also a good increase in MSRP and some minor increases in prices of options as well as cut down of few colors (Lunar Blue for example). At least for the colors and options I had in mind, this didn't seem great. Besides, the discounts from local dealers for ordering MY2020 was lukewarm at best. Most were not interested in taking orders altogether.

Started looking at vehicles on the local lots and finally (by coincidence) found a C63S which they had just finished taking photos and listed on their website but did not yet have it ready for the test drive. I had already done a test drive of a C63S a while ago but did not make up my mind back then. Went for a test drive in a different C63S which they had prepped than the one I was actually interested in. The V8 Biturbo and the exhaust sound were so enticing, it was hard to walk away from the test drive. I looked at the other C63S, which was very close to the colors and options I had in mind. Finally decided to pull the trigger and drive it back home.

The sales folks at the dealership made the experience truly simple (than what I had in mind initially) and memorable.

I have been driving this mostly in Comfort mode until I break-in the first 1000 miles. After driving a few hundred miles, these are my impressions so far:

1. Even in Comfort mode, the car is responsive. On highways/freeways, when making quick passes or squeezing in between cars with lane changes, I have left the mode in Comfort and still am able to give just a little extra gas to make the car shift down and hold gears longer. This is quite impressive.

2. The gear shifts in Comfort are smooth 90% of the time. It jumps through gears rapidly. I made a turn outside of the house and drove hardly 300ft to a nearby stop sign reaching a max speed around 25mph, and it was already in the 5th gear. It does not go to first gear in Comfort from what I figured and can also skip gears while upshifting. I'm guessing this is all done for the sake of better gas mileage.

3. It took me few days to adjust my muscle memory to shift into D, R or P using the stalk on the steering wheel. Especially after parking the car, my right hand always moved to the center console only to find the circular dial there.

4. The sedan comfortably seats four people with decent trunk space. The folks who rode back seat were impressed with the ride quality. I tried Sport and Sport+ briefly and the ride was manageable still in the rear seats.

5. The sedan is quite big in length considering it's a Compact Luxury sedan, but at the same time quite agile. I have a (older) mid size car in our garage, and the C63 is just an inch shorter than that in length. In terms of width, the C63 is quite wide. This gives it quite an aggressive styling. In terms of comfort I think the additional interior room is good and at the same time not too huge. I am glad I didn't get an E53 instead.

6. The touch interface on the steering wheel is really intuitive and am impressed. You get to keep both your hands on the steering all the time.

7. I'm still getting used to non touchscreen based UI. It is great that there are no fingerprints on the screen. I use Android Auto a lot and it takes a little scrolling up and down to navigate between the menus, but something that I should be able to learn as muscle memory over time. I've tried Android Auto in multiple cars while renting, and I have had to frequently either restart the car or the phone to keep things happy (eg. Nissan). I'm glad there has been none of that so far.

8. It took me a while to figure out how to manually bring up the 360 degree camera on demand. I realized that it could be added as a shortcut and brought up when needed. The system senses low speed maneuvering and does bring it up automatically 80% of the time, but there were times when I need to summon it manually while parking. The favorite works well, not sure if there is anything better. There is also the Park assist button in the center console, but that does not bring up the cameras.

9. Tried emotion start a few times and am addicted. I am tempted to start the car each time in this mode.

I hope to track the car once I cross the break-in period. I have already got complements about the car from neighbors who were walking by and saw the front end of the car parked in the garage. One person was curious especially which specific model this was.

 

Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
A truly wonderful car.

 

Great choice! Just curious, What is the msrp on the MY2020 that you saw on the order guide?

 

Thanks for sharing your experience.

Quick question on “emotion start” what is that?

 

My question exactly. Why the heck is EMOTION Start?

Is that take into account various Emotions when starting the car?

Like you’re Happy when you start it and Sad when you turn it off? Seriously though please elaborate...

 

LOL. May be the next generation AMGs would

You can start the car while holding either of the paddle shifters which causes the exhaust flaps to open. This causes the exhaust to roar each time. I might be wrong, but my guess is that this is equivalent of using Accessory mode to put the car in Sport/Sport+ which also causes the exhaust flaps to open in a similar fashion before starting the car although without switching the mode when using Emotion start.

 

$75,700 for the sedan. I am not sure about the Coupe and Cab. The ambient lighting is Stanadard with MY2020 I think. Also saw a new alarm system as standard I believe.

Most changes are for C43 with options exclusive to C63/C63S now being made available also to C43.

 

Emotion start revs higher.. I press the start button twice then turn on the exhaust or sport + then I do emotion start.

 

One other thing I couldn't figure is the purpose of the rectangular camera like device mounted on the top center of the windshield just behind the rear view mirror (when viewed from inside).

Looking at the manual it appears to be a traffic sign recognition camera that is used by DAP, but DAP is not one of the options on my car. The manual seems to indicate that it is a Multifunction Camera that can detect traffic signs / speed limits. I haven't gone through the manual completely on this topic yet.

So far, the digital display did not show any such detected speed limits. Any idea if I'm missing something?

I will give the manual another read this weekend and play around with the settings in the Vehicle menu to see if I can get this to work.

 

Congrats on the car. I pretty much concur with all your impressions. I've been enjoying my Coupe for the past 5 weeks here in Europe. Was past break-in in the second week, and now have 6200kms/3900miles on it already. Car is very solid, and a blast on the German Autobahn. So easy to reach triple digit speeds at half throttle. This is a car that easily travels long distances north of 200km w/o a sweat and w/o beating up the driver. With the 9 speed transmission the revs stay low so that it drives at those speeds using less fuel and quieter than other cars I've done this with. It's a very impressive GT.

A few tips/answers to your points.

1. You don't need to manually put it in P after parking. Just turn off the engine. It goes into P and engages the parking brake all on its own. I love this aspect of the modern electronic gear selectors. The pre-facelift didn't do this and had to be put in P manually, or I believe it went into P only after opening the driver's door. The new behavior is now in line with other brands that use electronic gear selectors.
2. The 360 camera you can activate also using the Park Assist button on the center console. Press it twice. The first press activates the parking assist, then if you press it again it activates the 360 camera and if you press it again, it turns it off.
3. The stereo cameras in the windshield and from the looks of it, there is also an infrared camera in there are used for various things. I have DAP, so it's used to recognize lane markings and monitor the cars around me and detecting traffic signs of all kinds. Not sure if the traffic sign detection requires DAP, though. With it, it automatically adapts to the speed limits, which has been great here in Europe given all the stationary speed traps that are hard to see. But besides the DAP functions it's used for the safety systems, which I believe you still have even w/o DAP. It recognizes pedestrians crossing in front of you and alerts of their presence (it actually works), and I think they still monitor the cars around you to warn you if you are on a possible collision course. MB has quite sophisticated safety systems and they actually seem to work with much fewer false positives than I experienced with other brands. Quite impressive actually what they do. Many things I only learned about during the factory tour at Mercedes-Benz in Sindelfingen and the next day at the private AMG factory tour. Can highly recommend the latter if you are ever in Germany. It's only available to AMG owners.

I'm an iPhone user, and CarPlay works very well, too, as opposed to some other brands. I've pretty much been exclusively using Google Maps here in Europe in order to get traffic information. The built-in data connection doesn't working here, since it uses Verizon in the USA. I've had a couple of electronic gremlins, though. The side mirrors occasionally stop auto folding, and I have to reset the setting to make it do it again and the center screen has gone dark on me a couple of times, but it didn't actually crash. It came back by selecting a different function. Overall, though, things work well on this car, and I'm sure there are gonna be software updates once the car arrives in the USA.

 

2020 C63 Coupe - $69,900
2020 C63S Coupe - $77,500

As mentioned, when I went through the MY2020 order process I also noticed it was mostly added standard features. A couple previously standalone options were added into option packages as well.

Like @Tuxdude I just ended up finding a 2019 car at my dealer and pulled the trigger. Ended up being a lot more spec'd than any car I ever built either on mbusa or the order I was going to put in

 

in those long runs, cruising in 9th, what kind of fuel consumption are you seing, superswiss?

 

I'm seeing around 22-23 mpg average, depending on how many unrestricted sections of the Autobahn I encounter and the current traffic allows me to gun it. That's on 4-6 hour trips. My overall average currently is 17.4 mpg since day 0. That's pretty good considering that I'm gunning it on the Autobahn whenever I can and have been to the Nurburgring for a few laps. 18 mpg is the rated mixed city/highway average, so even with the fast driving I've been doing I seem to manage close to the rated average. I did European Delivery with my '13 RS5 6 years ago. Don't remember my overall average at this stage, but the lifetime average is now at 14.3 mpg with around 72k miles. Only 4k miles of those were in Europe, so going by the current numbers, the C63S is more powerful than my RS5 and at least almost 22% more efficient. Fuel economy is not something that matters to me much, but I appreciate having to stop fewer times to refuel. I remember back with the RS5 on these trips I had days where I needed to refuel three times, and so far the most I had to do with the C63S was twice, but then I still had fuel left the next day driving around and for part of the way back.

 

1. Yes, the need to not put it in P and engage the parking brake is a great feature Even for R and D, it auto releases the parking break with just a tad bit of gas.
2. Will give the second time Park Assist button push a try next time. I tried pushing the Park Assist button in Accessory mode and it did not do anything, but using the Favorite or the menu item loaded the cameras still.
3. Yes, using the multi function camera for the standard safety features makes sense.

AMG factory tour sounds exciting, on my bucket list when I visit Germany

 

congratulations on your new cars !

there up to 5 buttons between the steering wheel and door and on top of the headlamps dial. on there are some buttons including steering pilot if you have that package, manual switching on of 360 cam, manually turning off the park assist parking space recognition and lane assist if you have it.

so if you want to turn on the 360 cam manually, just push the button ... or at least they had it there on the pre facelift

 

360 Camera has moved to the centre console and the
seat belt presenter has moved to the left of the steering wheel.
Basically they have swapped positions.

 

This has all changed with the facelift. The 360 button is no longer there, because the new parking assist is much more sophisticated now. Instead there's a multi function button on the center console right below the ECO mode button that is used to activate the parking assist/360 camera. The new parking assist is actually quite cool. It scans left and right and the parking spots come up visually on the center display. Then you just select which one you wanna park in, and whether you wanna park forward or reverse if applicable and then put it in D or R depending on the previous selection and then it handles everything from there. You only have to be ready to step on the brake if it somehow miscalculates. The rest like turning on the indicator and selecting the right gear is all done automatically. When ready to leave it can also autonomously get the car back out of the parking spot. I still mostly park it myself, but it's quite impressive how well it works and it's much better designed and programmed than in the pre-facelift.

 

My car has Parking Assistance Package but no DAP. There is still a button there (to the left of the steering wheel just above the headlight controls) to disable "Parking Assist PARKTRONIC". I believe the light turns up if it's disabled, and gets automatically enabled by default (even if disabled previously) when you start your car. The button to bring up the Parking Assistance and 360 Cameras is now located in the Center Console as others shared.

 

Update on bringing up the 360 Camera.

- In Accessory mode (i.e. without starting the engine), the only way to bring up the 360 Camera is using the Vehicle menu or by setting up a Favorite.
- When the engine is running, pressing the Parking Assistance button followed by scrolling down navigates you through the various views. Tried hitting the button twice but it did not help. Still this is easier than the Fave technique when your engine is running. Thanks everyone.