2028 Mercedes-AMG GT63 SUV Quick Drive: 1,153 HP’s Worth of Electrified Performance With V-8 Theater

Left foot on the brake pedal. The guttural V-8 rumble becomes a booming roar as you push your right foot to the floor, the vibrations building through the back of your seat before what sounds like a rapid-fire artillery barrage ricochets through the cabin. Rev limiter. Sidestep your left foot. The thrust is instant and intense, crushing you back into the seat. Watch the tach needle zing around to the 7,200-rpm redline and flick the righthand paddle as the upshift warnings light up the digital dash. Second, third, fourth. It happens about as fast as you can say it, that mighty V-8 bellow barely pausing for breath as the upshifts hit home with an oily thump.

It’s all fake, of course. But in Sport+ mode, the electric-powered Mercedes-AMG GT63 SUV sounds and feels exactly as if there’s a mighty 6.3-liter naturally aspirated V-8 under the hood driving all four wheels through AMG’s bulletproof nine-speed Speedshift MCT wet-clutch transmission. You can’t help but shake your head and laugh out loud. Welcome to AMG’s theater of the absurd.

It’s Now the World’s Most Powerful SUV

The Mercedes-AMG GT63 SUV is not just the most powerful SUV ever from the three-pointed star’s in-house hot shop, faster than the GLE63 and meaner than the G63; it’s currently the world’s most powerful SUV, full stop. In Race mode, the GT63 SUV pumps out 1,153 hp and 1,475 lb-ft of torque (just nipping the Porsche Cayenne Turbo Electric’s 1,139 hp and crushing its 1,106 lb-ft of torque). Mercedes claims it will go from 0 to 60 mph as rapidly as a Bugatti Chiron, stopping the clock in just 2.4 seconds. And it feels every bit that fast.

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We got behind the wheel of the AMG GT63 SUV for an exclusive pre-test drive at Mercedes-Benz’s proving ground at Immendingen, south of Stuttgart. The second vehicle to be built on the high-tech, high-performance AMG.EA electric vehicle architecture, the AMG GT SUV shares not just its essential hardware with the muscular AMG GT 4 Door Coupe, but its essential character, too. The GT SUV might be pitched as a family vehicle, but it’s for families that like to party hard when the mood takes them.

The AMG.EA architecture was designed from the outset to enable both low ride heights and low seating positions, and so the GT63 SUV’s driving position feels quite carlike, with all-round visibility that’s much better than in the low-slung GT 4 Door Coupe’s. The GT63’s interior has the same 21st century techno-muscle vibe of the GT 4 Door, with carbon fiber and screens and splashes of metal and brightly colored stitching everywhere, but it has a rear seat that comfortably accommodates tall adults. And while the GT 4 Door’s cabin closes in around you, the SUV’s interior feels light and airy by comparison.

Apart from that flat-out acceleration run, we didn’t get a chance to do much fast driving at Immendingen. But the steering in the GT63, which was fitted with Hankook Ion tires on 23-inch rims (285/35 up front and 325/30 items at the rear) felt concise and nicely weighted, with a smooth and easily modulated brake pedal.

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Then AMG Turns Up the Theater

In Comfort or Sport mode, the AMG GT SUV feels like just another immensely fast electric-powered SUV, all instant-on torque and big-tire traction. The steering-wheel paddles allow you to switch through five levels of regenerative braking, from a coast mode that will keep the GT SUV sailing down the road when you lift off the accelerator, to a one-pedal driving mode that will slow the car at up to 0.68 g the moment you lift off, sending up to 600 kilowatts of energy back into the battery. Race mode ensures maximum power and torque are on tap at all times. In other modes, a single pull on both steering-wheel paddles unlocks an additional boost of power for a total of 63 seconds.

Selecting Sport+ mode not only stiffens the GT SUV’s sinews and sharpens its responses, it also switches on that iconic AMG soundtrack and dials it all the way up to 11. What you hear in the GT SUV is real, a genuine V-8 sound digitized from recordings of actual AMG V-8 engines. But the effect is an illusion, generated by an intelligent real-time mixing system that uses more than 1,600 sound files to sonically interpret the relationship between throttle position and the torque load at the driving wheels.

Sport+ mode’s V-8 shock-and-awe soundtrack and manual shift capability is not a gimmick. It’s a genuinely useful driver’s tool that helps you judge the rates of acceleration and braking as accurately as you can in a car with a high-performance internal combustion engine. And, as it deftly interrupts the torrent of torque from the e-motors on the upshifts and initiates finely calculated dollops of regen on the downshifts, it can be used to balance the GT63 SUV’s handling through corners. Sport+ is more than just party mode, it’s the mode you select when you want to hustle the big GT SUV along a winding road.

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Exploring AMG’s Digital Playground

The fun doesn’t stop there. Three rotary controllers on the center console are the interface for what Mercedes calls the AMG Race Engineer. The Response Control controller adjusts the sharpness of the response of the electric motors to commands from your right foot. Agility Control, which is only active with the ESP switched off, adjusts the powertrain’s front-to-rear torque distribution to direct up to 90 percent through the rear wheels to change the GT SUV’s chassis balance from slight understeer through neutral handling to controlled oversteer. The Traction Control controller, which is also only activated with the ESP switched off, adjusts the level of traction control intervention through nine stages, just as on the AMG GT63 Pro and on the AMG race cars.

Will the AMG GT63 SUV drift? Oh, yes. The AMG Race Engineer will let you do it, and even though Mercedes made us sit in the passenger seat while one of their pro drivers demonstrated how this 5,700-pound SUV could be made to pirouette around cones like a gymkhana king, it was another laugh-out-loud moment delivered by this extraordinary EV.

Three Flavors of Electric Mayhem

The AMG GT SUV will be available in three different states of tune. Like the heavy-hitting GT63, the midrange GT55 has three axial-flux e-motors developed by the Mercedes-Benz subsidiary Yasa specifically for AMG, but their total system output has been dialed back to a still monstrous 805 hp and 1,372 lb-ft. As in the GT63, the front motor is a booster, engaged only when additional power or traction is needed at the front axle, decoupling under light loads for efficiency. The entry-level GT53 has just two e-motors, Mercedes-Benz–designed and engineered radial flow units used in mainstream Benz EVs like the EQS, that generate a mere 536 hp and 590 lb-ft.

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AMG’s Active Ride Control multilink suspension, which features triple-adjustable air springs and semi-active roll stabilization that uses interconnected hydraulics in place of physical anti-roll bars, is standard. So is rear-wheel steering. The GT63 gets carbon-ceramic brakes, with steel rotors standard on the GT55 and GT53. The need to accommodate three motors in the top trims and two different motors in the base model required AMG to develop a new variable AMG Performance 4Matic AWD system.

An EV Battery Built for Speed

The AMG GT SUV’s lightweight, high-performance battery pack was developed in-house at AMG with help from engineers at Mercedes-AMG High Performance Powertrains in Brixworth, England, where the complex powertrains for the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 racers are designed and built. Its cells feature a unique nickel-cobalt-manganese-aluminium (NCMA) combination in the cathode and an anode with high silicon content. The tall and thin cells, which are encased in lightweight laser-welded aluminium housings that also provide better electrical and heat conductivity, are cooled by an electrically non-conductive oil.

The battery in the GT55 and GT53 is the same as that used in the GT 4 Door Coupe, with a usable capacity of 107 kWh. For the GT63 AMG, engineers have added four extra modules to the battery pack—basically filling in the hollows created to give the GT 4 Door Coupe’s rear-seat passengers room for their feet—that boosts the usable capacity to 127 kWh, making it the largest-capacity EV battery made by Mercedes. AMG.EA’s 800-volt electrical architecture enables charging speeds of up to 710 kW that can add up to 280 miles of range in just 10 minutes.

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The Verdict: This EV Ain’t Boring

We look forward to spending a lot more time with the AMG GT63 SUV. We want to learn more about how it rides on the road, and how it handles on the track. We want to more thoroughly explore the capabilities of the AMG Race Engineer, to find out whether it’s a genuine driver’s tool or a digital gimmick. That said, our first impression is that Mercedes-AMG has created a benchmark high-performance SUV. Sure, the GT63 SUV is powered by fast-moving electrons rather than high-octane hydrocarbons. But that’s irrelevant. What is relevant is that it ain’t boring. If you love driving, and love driving something that’s big and loud and fast and thoroughly entertaining, you’re going to love the Mercedes-AMG GT63 SUV.