Mercedes-AMG CLE 53

Lower-rung AMG gains butch looks and big power. Can it stick it to the BMW M4?

It’s been a while since Mercedes-AMG model designations had any bearing on engine capacities, but we thought we’d figured this out, right? 63 is the full-house one, 53 is basically an AMG Line pack on the biggest engine.In comes the Mercedes-AMG CLE 53, looking all butch with its wider wheel arches. The spec sheet mentions a rear-wheel-drive-only drift mode (it’s four-wheel drive as standard). A combined 443bhp and 4.2sec to 62mph sound pretty full-house as well. Sure, it’s slower than a BMW M4, but super-coupé performance has well and truly jumped the shark anyway, so that’s just a question of how unusable you want your performance to be. At £73,075, it’s cheaper too.There is going to be a 63 version, which will reportedly have a V8 but it remains to be seen whether it will be a heavy, complicated plug-in hybrid. At that point, this mild-hybrid, inline-six Mercedes-AMG CLE 53 might seem like the purer, simpler driver’s car, in as much as you can even apply those words to a two-tonne, mild-hybrid car with variable four-wheel drive and four-wheel steering.

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