Short Take Road Test
To shoppers strolling the priciest showrooms of the car market, the landscape these days looks a lot like it did in the 1930s. Bugatti is back and as over the top as ever, Bentley builds massive, fast GTs, Rolls-Royce is selling a Phantom again, Maybach has outsmarted the Grim Reaper, a coachbuilder like Fisker will craft Your Highness a custom body, and perched among these glitterati is the Mercedes S65 AMG, a car that blends luxury, performance, and exclusivity in a way that recalls Mercedes' supercharged supercars of the '30s.
To create an S65, AMG starts with the latest-generation S-class, adds a menacing body kit that wouldn't look out of place on a Roush Mustang, bolts on 20-inch wheels and tires that fill the exaggerated fender flares and house huge brakes, firms up the Airmatic suspension, and slips in its most powerful engine. There's no supercharged straight-eight under the hood from the glorious past, but the modern equivalent: a bombastic 6.0-liter twin-turbo V-12 that makes 604 horsepower and 738 pound-feet of torque.
Forget about 60 mph — that's over in a wheelspin-filled 4.2 seconds. Where the righteous S65 really shows its stuff is above 100 mph. Squash the accelerator, and before you can say Mississippi 22 times, 150 mph arrives, faster than a Ferrari F430. Braking is similarly astounding. In front, large 15.4-inch rotors defy reason and stop the 5081-pound S65 from 70 mph in 154 feet, a stop several feet shorter than Mercedes' outrageous 617-hp superstar, the $455,750 SLR, can muster.
In keeping with the tradition of being unobtainable, the S65 is priced much like its predecessors. Those top-of-the-line Mercedes of the 1930s cost roughly 15 times the price of a mid-'30s Ford. The S65 that passed through our hands bore a price tag of $191,215 or, roughly, what 15 Ford Focuses cost. Suddenly, it's 1936 again.
