Fans of the egg-faced volte-face will be smirking into their coffee mugs this week at the news that Mercedes-AMG’s incoming CLE 63 coupé is to get not four, not six but eight cylinders.
What’s more, when the current C63 saloon and estate come in for their mid-life refresh next year, they too will become available with AMG’s new mild-hybrid V8 set-up.
This was never the plan. Mercedes wanted – and I use that word loosely – the 2.0-litre four-pot M139 to succeed the C63’s 4.0-litre V8 M177 full- stop and threw in punchy electrical assistance to sweeten the deal. The diddy M139 would be marketed on the might of its world-beating specific output and its Formula 1 technology.
In fairness, from a purely logical standpoint, this wasn’t an insane idea. The M139’s specific output in the current C63 is 236bhp per litre. It’s a snort-inducing stat that in years gone by was attainable only if you left an RB26DETT unattended in a tobacco-perfumed workshop in Chiba Prefecture.
It’s an awesome feat of engineering in a road car with Apple CarPlay and a big boot, that will tolerate both freezing starts in Siberia and being ragged senseless in bitumen-melting heat on a Saudi expressway.
So the M139 is special. And expensive. The block is chill-cast, there are lots of forged bits and it’s hand-assembled. If, when this engine surfaced in the A45 hatch in 2019, you had told me there was a 90sec delay when you started the car to allow time for warm water to be pumped around the block and tolerances to sweeten up, DTM-style, I might actually have believed you.
But the M139 just isn’t the right donkey for the C63. Not at this moment. Or possibly ever.
Sales have been dismal. PR-wise, it has been a disaster. Electrification has also made the car shockingly porky. Perhaps BMW could have got away with such a dramatic downsizing for the mainstay of its M portfolio, because the M3 has never been quite as ‘engine first, chassis second’ as the C63, and of course there is precedent in the E30.
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