Mercedes-AMG CLE 53 review

Lower-rung AMG gains butch looks and big power, write James Disdale, Mark Tisshaw and Illya Verpraet

- 

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. Then in comes the Mercedes-AMG CLE 53.

WHAT’S IT LIKE?

It’s all butch with its wider wheel arches and 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 (there's a convertible too) performance has well and truly jumped the shark anyway, so that’s just a question of how unusable you want your performance to be.

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.

With the CLE, Mercedes has amalgamated the old C-Class Coupé and E-Class Coupé — and their convertible derivatives — into one model, just like it used to do in the 1990s and early 2000s with the CLK.

Compared with the standard Mercedes CLE, the 53 gets a new front bumper, an AMG-style Panamericana grille, a large rear spoiler and decorative diffuser.

Thanks to wider wheel arches, it’s also 58mm wider at the front and 75mm wider at the rear, enhancing its aggressive look.

Further back, the 53 gets AMG-specific door mirrors and a more aggressive rear end, thanks to a restyled bumper and lip spoiler.

Mechanically, it’s more of a halfway house between the full-fat AMGs and the standard Mercedes. It develops 442bhp, but does it from a breathed-on standard Mercedes engine, rather than a full hand-made Affalterbach product.