If the exterior leaves you in little doubt as to the overtly sporting nature of the C63, the theme continues inside, and how. The excellent basic platform that is the standard new C-class cabin has been taken to another place altogether, and the result is extremely successful.
For starters, the seats are quite superb, featuring massive extra bolstering in all the right places and electronic adjustment in every plane. The wheel is a flat-bottomed item that feels peachy in the hands and also features numerous AMG upgrades, including a bespoke menu for track driving. Select race mode, for example, and a timer appears in the already good-looking instrument binnacle, while you can also monitor oil and coolant temperatures on the circuit.
Standard seat upholstery is supple Nappa leather. The test car, refreshingly, was not loaded with extras, yet it still looked and felt like an exquisitely high-quality item inside. And we know already how spacious and practical the C-class cabin is. Space in the rear is excellent for this size of car, while the big boot has not been compromised during the AMG transformation.
Even the pricing has been improved over AMG’s previous models, which have tended to be expensive beside their rivals and more depreciative in the long run. But the C63 certainly kicks off in the right way by being so competitively priced in the first place. Only time will tell how much it depreciates.
The real killer, apart from company car tax and insurance, is fuel consumption. On average it returned 18.9mpg with us, but more often it was around the 11-13mpg mark. That means a real-world range of little more than 180 miles on the 14.5-gallon tank.