for years now German brands have been playing kind of fast and loose with the
idea of what is actually a coupe and my mind coops are two door vehicles but a
lot of the German brands have said now coupes can also be forward to our
vehicles like this one this is the new 2019 Mercedes AMG GT
four-door now let's get one thing straight right off the bat it is not a
longer larger version of the GT two-door it actually sits on a completely
different platform underneath this actually shares more in common with the
e63 wagon and now you're saying yourself now wait a minute if this thing really
is more 63 wagon than GT two-door where do they get off calling it a coupe well
in my mind there's a couple of qualifications you have to have in order
to really be called a coupe and does this thing have them well let me take
you through it the first qualification for being called a coupe in my mind is
that it really has to look the part this thing really does from the super low
back end with the slim taillights and the hatchback to the frameless windows
on the doors to the low front end with the headlights and the grille that look
a lot like the AMG GT two-door I think that this is probably one of the closest
executions to an actual four-door coupe that I've yet seen second qualification
for being a proper sport coupe is it has to have the power this one most
certainly does there are three power trains coming for the AMG GT four-door
first as a 3 litre twin turbo inline 6 made it up to a mild hybrid system and
the second powertrain is a 4 litre twin-turbo v8 in two different forms now
the 63 and the 63s are the more performance models the 63s that we see
here is 630 horsepower and goes 0 to 60 in what mercedes says is about 3 seconds
conservatively it may actually be a little bit less than that they're saying
all that power gets to the ground through a standard all-wheel drive
system but it's a rear biased all-wheel drive system and in the 63s like this
one you can actually shunt a hundred percent of that power to the rear wheels
in a kind of drift mode which is great for scaring the in-laws on the way to
dinner the third element of a proper sports
coupe is that it has to look the part inside as well and this one again I
think fits the bill now most sports coupes the two doors anyway don't have
much in the way of a backseat for people if they have one at all the 4-door coupe
do and this one actually has a pretty good back seat there's plenty of legroom
there's plenty Headroom as well and you may have some
smaller side windows because of the low roof but this really isn't the penalty
box at all even the fact that it has a moon roof doesn't impact that much the
rear headroom now you can only get these in a four seat model in the US you can
get a five seater internationally but if you want a five seat four-door coupe in
the United States Mercedes but instead I'd like to show you the CLS up front it
looks much more like an AMG GT two-door than the e-class on which it's based now
the upper part of the - yeah there is some eClass influence there but look at
the center console this is directly influenced by the two-door coupe model
it's wide it's got a very similar style to it the shifter is the same as well
and this one now features the new trackpad instead of the rotary knob
Mercedes did away with the rotary knob for its multimedia system and we're not
entirely sure we like that yet but we'll let you know as soon as we get to
actually drive one and test them you've also got reconfigurable buttons here and
there the screens that you see on the center console light up when you start
the car and the steering wheel itself has two light-up screens as well on the
right it's always going to be your drive mode on the left
it's a reconfigurable hotkey so maybe you get in the car every time and you
turn on the super loud exhaust because you like everyone to know what you
bought well on the left you can actually key this hotkey to activate the exhaust
at the touch of a button whenever you get in so is this thing a proper sports
coupe you know what two doors or four doors I'm kind of tired of fighting this
battle I would call this thing a proper coupe a sports coupe even now isn't
there another four-door coupe in the mercedes-benz lineup and yes there is
the CLS class is also called a four-door coupe but Mercedes thinks that there's
room for two of those in the lineup just like there are two to do our drop tops
in their lineup the SL class and the AMG GT two-door convertible as well they
have different missions this one has a different mission than the CLS as well
the CLS is more about luxury this one skews much more towards the sports end
of the spectrum there's no pricing yet announced for this thing but Mercedes
tells me that if you look at the Porsche Panamera Turbo that is pretty close to
what you're going to be looking at for one of these when they arrive later this
year and when they do arrive later this year we'll bring it all for you at
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