Those of you who follow our 24 Hours of LeMons coverage should be familiar with the harrowing, yearlong tale of the worst car in LeMons racing history (and, perhaps, in human history). Short version, this 1986 Plymouth Reliant-K station wagon crisscrossed the continent in 2013, racking up more than 26,000 road miles, 4678 race miles, and killing eight engines plus the sanity of dozens of racers during the course of the year. The slong tory? Well, that follows.
The final, and most punitive, chapter of this saga was the Reliant's drive from Denver to San Francisco in December, a nightmarish trudge across five states during freakishly cold weather. A 1978 Checker Marathon race car accompanied the K-car, and I decided to join the caravan with a station wagon so advanced— especially compared to Iacocca's Plymouth— that it appeared to have come from a superior extraterrestrial civilization: the 2014 Mercedes-Benz E63 AMG S-Model 4MATIC Wagon. (Read our full test here—Ed.) The contrast between the wretched Reliant-K and the glorious Benz made for an interesting road trip, and the E63 may have saved the lives of the racers in their not-meant-for-this-sort-of-thing heaps. Even though it's been a year since the journey, the post-K-Car stress has been so crippling that I have been unable to tell the tale without suffering from the shakes . . . until now. At last, here's the story of that trip.
As the Reliant was passed from team to team around the country, for the ill-conceived K-It-FWD program, there seemed no way to get the car from Wisconsin (where it had finally won the Index of Effluency award at Road America) to the Arse Freeze-a-Palooza race in the San Francisco Bay Area. Then Mike Taylor of Hong Norrth Racing (one of the winningest LeMons teams in the South) volunteered to drive it the 2200 miles. He would be racing a different car at Sears Point, but thought driving the K-car to get there would be fun. Fun. That's a good one!
The plan was to drive the car to Denver, where I live and the Rocket Surgery Racing Checker Marathon is based, and then we'd all drive together the remaining 1250 or so miles to the track. Mike had an old Toyota Supra heater assembly (which came from a car that went on to contend in 2014), so he rigged that up on the floor of the Reliant and spliced it into the terrifying whirlwind of random wiring installed by a dozen LeMons teams in fix-it-now frenzies. This setup kept him warm enough through the 10-degree temperatures on the highway from Wisconsin.
At Rocket Surgery HQ near Denver, the temperature was dropping fast on the day before we were to depart. Even though paint doesn't dry so well at below-freezing temperatures, we needed to re-theme the K-Car. I decided that, given how punitively bad the Reliant had been during the 2013 season, the only explanation was that Lee Iacocca must have been a Soviet agent, working to destroy the nation's confidence in American cars.
So Rocket Surgery Racing driver and team artist Mona Lambrecht painted this mural on a junkyard Aries-K's hood prior to the arrival of the Reliant. From left to right, that's LeMons Chief Perp Jay Lamm, Order of the Red Banner winner Lee Iacocca, and yours truly.
The Reliant showed up at Rocket Surgery Racing HQ, a few miles north of Denver, just in time for the onslaught of the worst cold wave to hit this part of the country in many years.
The E63 had been dropped off at my house the day before, and the Mercedes-Benz folks had been thoughtful enough to install some all-season tires. I grew up in California and this was just my fourth winter in a place with real winter weather, so I wasn't fully confident of my ability to avoid stuffing this gorgeous machine into a drainage ditch when the roads got icy, but I figured if any engineers could save me from myself, it would be the ones from Mercedes-Benz.
The drive over to Rocket Surgery HQ on Wednesday morning was no trouble for the Benz, but the temperature dropped from 30 to 19 during 45 minutes of sitting in traffic, and the snow didn't show any signs of letting up. Mike had already sliced open his head on some sharp object in the K-Car while attempting to fix some of the car's many electrical problems. Did I mention that this Reliant is the worst car in LeMons history, out of the thousands of miserable heaps to have competed in the series? Mike works as an RF engineer, keeping the nation's kludged-together wireless networks working, and his considerable skills (and sense of humor) would be given the toughest possible test on this trip.
Rich von Sneidern, captain of Rocket Surgery Racing (shown here in Bender costume with his mid-engined Renault 4CV LeMons car) is a mechanical engineer, hill-climb racer, and old-school hot-rodder, and he'd need all of his toughness and resourcefulness to make it through. You see, there had been a setback the day before.
The plan had been for the Checker Marathon race car to do the Denver-to-SF-and-back-to-Denver trip on a car trailer towed by this Cummins 6BT–powered Kaiser Jeep M715, the military version of the Gladiator.
But then the Rocket Surgery Racing teammate with the tow vehicle had had to cancel at the last minute, and so Rich was faced with the choice of letting down the members of Faster Farms Racing, who had signed up for arrive-and-drive seats in the Checker, or just driving the thing to California, with a barely-functioning factory heater, no weatherstripping, suspect rod-knocky-sounding small-block Chevy engine, not-quite-right Ford Toploader four-speed transmission (attached to the Chevy engine with a homemade adapter), and the race rubber and fuel cans strapped to the roof.
The Checker's heater worked a little bit, and Rich got busy donning every piece of warm clothing he owned. I decided that it would be best to run the Mercedes back to my place and grab a spare heater core that I had lying around (a remnant of a Volvo 244 I had helped turn into a race car many years before), just in case. With road conditions getting worse by the minute, I noticed that the AMG E63 simply didn't care about ice, snow, wind, or anything else; as other drivers slid all over I-25 with panicked facial expressions and lots of wheel-sawing angst, I was experiencing about the same stress levels as a retired podiatrist pootling his Mercury Grand Marquis 20 mph under the speed limit in suburban Tucson in June. For the first of many hundreds of times during the next several days, I thought: What a car!
Late in the morning on Wednesday, we hit the road, heading up I-25 toward I-80. The Checker sported its roof rack. The Reliant had a skeletal pine tree tied to its rack, as a sort of cruel parody of the family wagon picking up the Christmas tree. Both cars had cheap snow tires installed, mismatched junkyard ones on the Checker and Wal-Mart's most affordable set on the Plymouth. Rich, driving the Checker, started to feel life-threateningly cold right away, as the frigid wind knifed through the door gaps. Mike, in the Reliant, was chilly but coping as he headed north and then west.
Bringing up the rear of this weird parade in the Mercedes-Benz, I was enjoying Middle Eastern Potentate–grade comfort as I watched the temperature drop. Five below zero? It couldn't get worse than that, could it?
The HVAC controls in the Mercedes-Benz are suitably complex in the Teutonic fashion one might expect, and the owner's manual is an all-electronic deal that you access via the LCD screen. I hadn't taken the time to drill down through all the levels of the instructions for regulating the temperature in just the exact way, but that simply meant that I couldn't get the perfectly heated air to come out the vents in the precise mix I wanted.
At that moment, Mike was sitting in a low-end one-piece race seat padded with foam rubber that he found in a dumpster behind a Wal-Mart in Nebraska, and getting his heat from an open heater core on the floor.
Rich, also sitting in a one-piece racing seat, was bundled up with random clothing and blankets like a German soldier at Stalingrad, and his heater provided a tepid trickle of slightly-warmer-than-outside air. (He later discovered that the Checker's heater core was almost completely clogged by corrosion.) The contrast between my ride and their rides couldn't have been much greater; I felt that class war between the haves (me) and the have-nots (them) might have broken out at any moment . . . which helped me get into the proper E63 AMG mind-set.
Stopping for gas in Cheyenne, Wyoming, it took about all the will I could muster to climb out of what I was already thinking of as the Greatest Long-Road-Trip Vehicle of All Time and into the nodule-shriveling cold.
At this point, I hadn't had the opportunity to use more than a tiny fraction of the car's 577 horsepower, what with being chained to a couple of poky crapcan racers on icy roads. Fuel economy for the first leg of the trip was close to 20 mpg, which was amazing for such a powerful beast. (We achieved 16 mpg in our test—Ed.)
Over the crackly walkie-talkies we were using for communication, I kept hearing garbled references to "cold," "death," and "digit amputation" from Rich. Meanwhile, Mike was getting alarmed by the showers of sparks coming from the K-Car's exposed wiring harness, not to mention the voltmeter's oscillations between 5 and 29 volts.
By the time we were about 20 miles east of Rawlins, Wyoming, the sun had set and the temperature had dropped to 20 degrees below zero. The K-Car was showing every sign of crapping out any second, and Rich was in genuine danger of passing out from hypothermia and/or losing his extremities to frostbite. We pulled off at a lonely gas station on I-80 and discussed our options, as the clerk gazed suspiciously at the weirdest collection of cars he'd ever seen show up on his watch.
I suggested that we leave those hooptie-ass LeMons cars at the gas station, put everyone in the wagon, and drive in comfort to the next town with a nice warm hotel. Rich and Mike, however, felt that they'd be able to fix their cars' problems if they had a couple of hours to recuperate, so we climbed back in our respective rides and drove to Rawlins. After checking into a cheap motel and having dinner at a joint favored by oil-rig workers, we agreed to meet in the parking lot at 9:00 p.m. for some car work. My comfortable ride in the E63 had made me soft, but those two felt that wrenching Antarctic-style in a motel parking lot would be a walk in the park next to what they'd just been through.
Now, a word about how many car journalists usually experience a car like the E63 wagon might be in order here. Typically, on a launch event, you get a press car offering this level of luxury at some ritzy resort town—say, in the California wine country or maybe the South of France—and you eat gourmet food while chatting with the manufacturer's PR reps after a day of driving with great élan on tourist-brochure back roads. What you don't do is take a $113,000 press car and use it as a parts runner for a pair of broken low-budget race cars in a frozen motel parking lot at 2:00 a.m. in Rawlins freakin' Wyoming. My hat is off to Mercedes-Benz PR for offering me the use of this car, this pinnacle of the automotive art, and saving me from my original plan: to ride shotgun in the Reliant wagon.
At this point, the temperature had plunged to an Ivan Denisovich-grade 23 degrees below zero (for rest-of-the-world types, that's -30.5 Celsius), but Rich and Mike—fortified with food and a spell in the motel room with the thermostat turned up to 85 degrees—were committed to fixing their cars, and I was committed to helping them. Rich's plan was to take the Volvo 240 heater core and plumb it into the Checker's cooling system, using a computer muffin fan to blow heated air at the general vicinity of the driver's seat. While I took the Mercedes-Benz to the parts store to get heater hose, Rich began clearancing the Marathon's sheetmetal for hose routing.
Mike, meanwhile, had discovered that the battery-to-alternator wire in the Reliant-K had been running a bit hot, thanks to numerous shorts in the masking-taped-together wiring harness that had accreted during the car's ownership by a dozen bands of screeching, Everclear-swilling lower primates LeMons teams during the previous year.
After I picked up some wire at the parts store across town, Mike got to work building some new K-Car wiring-harness sections in the motel lobby. Yes, that doctorate in electrical engineering came in handy!
It may have hit 25 below zero, but we were too busy trying to get this nightmare over with to check the temperature.
In any case, it was cold enough to shatter tools under normal use. I kept the engine running and the heater going in the E63, and we took turns sitting in the back seat and thawing out.
We appeared to be the only inhabitants of the motel with no connection to the oil industry, and we got a lot of double-takes from gentlemen in serious insulated coveralls emerging from dually pickups as we huddled around our bizarre vehicular threesome.
I opted to sacrifice a beloved flannel shirt I'd owned for 25 years in order to make some field-expedient door-seal weatherstripping for the Checker. It was too thin to be of any use as a garment in this weather, so I broke out the knife.
Thanks to the parka Subaru had given me a month earlier for the notorious "Donner Party" launch of the XV Crosstrek Hybrid in Iceland and the Busted Knuckle Garage trapper hat I'd been issued for the 2008 25 Hours of Thunderhill race, I was staying reasonably warm, but the cozy brown leather confines of the E63 wagon kept beckoning to me. Did you know that the ratchet mechanisms of zip-ties won't work in this sort of cold? I didn't, and learned that thawing the ratchet ends in my mouth was necessary before use. This image was seen by the LeMons community as symbolic of the K-Car Hell Journey and later was immortalized in oil paint by a racer.
In between breaks in the Mercedes, I was able to turn my Alice In Chains-in-1990 flannel shirt into (possibly) credible Checker Marathon door seals.
After many, many hours of this torture, Mike had done what he could with the Reliant's wiring harness. Rich had fashioned the Volvo heater core into this heater, which was designed to blow warm air directly into his crotch. He'd throw a couple of blankets over the whole mess, and—combined with the car's new weatherstripping—this would, in theory, keep him warm enough to get to California. We went to bed, resolved to resume our odyssey at the crack of dawn on Thursday.
Which, of course, didn't happen. It got so cold overnight that the battery in the Checker froze solid and shattered the case, and the K-Car refused to have anything to do with starting. It should go without saying that the E63 started instantly in the 15-below morning chill and drove effortlessly on roads of pure zero-traction ice back to the car-parts store. With the 4MATIC all-wheel-drive system and all-season radials—not snow tires, mind you—the big Benz never felt even slightly sketchy, even with my Californian's lack of winter-driving experience.
This was about the fifth time the E63 had rumbled into the icy parking lot of the Rawlins parts store.
Having a station wagon made this phase of the adventure much easier for us; we threw all the temperature-sensitive gear into the back. I recommend the plastic cargo-bay liner option if you get one of these cars, especially if you're going to haul frozen car batteries around.
I'd only had the car for a couple of days at this point, but I was in love. Just look at it!
After much futzing, kvetching, frozen fingers, and trudging around with jumper cables, we managed to light the fires in both the Checker and the Reliant, and we headed back in the direction of I-80, the Mercedes with no drama and the other two cars with a great deal of tire-spinning and tank-slappage . . . and then the exhaust system on the Reliant fell off and began dragging on the ground. So we pulled off in an industrial park to do some more work.
The contrast between the wagons had become even more clear by this time, somehow, and I could tell both Mike and Rich were beginning to hate me for my futuristic German one-percenter-wagen. I felt that it would be an impolitic moment to mention that the Mercedes had saved all our asses from frozen death during the now-legendary Rawlins Days Inn Death Wrench the night before.
The original plan had been to drive from Denver to Wendover, Utah, on Wednesday, spend the night at a pleasant casino hotel on the Nevada side, maybe check out the Bonneville Salt Flats in the morning, then drive to Sears Point on Thursday. Our revised plan was to leave Rawlins and make a crazed dash west on I-80 to Donner Pass, getting over the Sierras before the expected massive snowstorm at the California/Nevada line closed I-80 at the pass, and spending the night somewhere below the snow line in California. That plan got blown to hell right away, with I-80 a deadly sheet of treacherous black ice for the entirety of western Wyoming. Over and over, we'd creep past jackknifed trucks and upside-down cars. Rich and Mike are expert ice drivers and I had modern all-wheel drive on my side, but serious speed wasn't an option here.
Still, we kept pushing on. As Chief Justice of the 24 Hours of LeMons Supreme Court, I had to get to the race track by oh-dark-thirty on Saturday morning, which meant that I couldn't afford to be trapped east of Donner Pass on Thursday night. The field-expedient heater in the Checker was helping a little bit and the temperature had climbed to a relatively balmy two degrees above zero, but it was clear that Rich wasn't going to be able to last long once the sun went down, and the K-Car's alternator was attempting to force-feed the battery 34 volts.
Still in Wyoming, the Reliant sputtered and crapped out—in the midst of a stop-and-go traffic jam caused by another black-ice 18-wheeler wreck. This was the worst moment of the entire trip. With honking big-rigs skidding by a few feet away and the E63 working upstream as a hazards-blinking safety block, we had to unload most of the gear from the Checker's trunk (in order to reach the trunk-mounted battery, because race car) and string two daisy-chained jumper cables 20 feet back to the dead battery (also because race car, and because previous all-lemur K-Car teams), then try to make the Plymouth start up. I suggested in the strongest possible terms that we explore Plan B, which involved pushing the Reliant into the ditch and setting it on fire, warming our hands on the flames and cheering the demise of this horrible goddamn car), but Mike would have none of it.
Somehow, we got out of that ordeal alive and with the K-Car running (barely). Our crippled caravan then limped west towards the Utah line. And, unsurprisingly, the Reliant couldn't even crawl all the way to the border, clanking to a halt somewhere outside of Evanston, Wyoming. Long story short, a previous LeMons team had been confused by the engine-computer-regulated alternator used by the Mitsubishi V-6 in the K-Car and rigged up a 1962 Plymouth Fury voltage regulator to control the Denso alternator, which was freaking out and cooking one electrical component after another with absurdly high voltage. I brought up Plan C (buying all the firearms and ammunition that our credit-card limits would bear and spending the rest of the day blasting that miserable Communist Plymouth into a pile of unrecognizable metal confetti), but Mike was willing to install a fresh alternator and keep slogging westward.
While he did that, Rich and I huddled in the E63 and started working the LeMons network via telephone. The hard-core LeMons fanatics had been tracking our journey online and we decided to seek some help from teams located nearby ("nearby" in this part of the country means "the same time zone"). Stick Figure Racing, based in Salt Lake City, races a pair of twin-engined Toyotas, and we thought perhaps they'd be willing to let Rich and Mike use their shop to fix the K-Car's electrical system and the Checker's heater.
Instead, the Stick Figure folks came up with the incredibly generous offer of loaning their car trailer and tow vehicle to Rich and Mike, so that they could tow the obviously hopeless K-Car to California. They'd spend the night at Stick Figure Racing HQ in Salt Lake City, rest up, and then set out for the southern route, bypassing the no-doubt-closed-by-then Donner Pass and entering California at about the latitude of Bakersfield and enjoying the much warmer weather predicted for Friday. All we had to do was get the K-Car to the rest stop near Echo, Utah.
After a few minutes of vending-machine cuisine at the rest stop, the Stick Figure Racing squad came to the rescue. We put the Reliant on the trailer, then I said my goodbyes and headed west in the best station wagon in the world. Free at last!
Checking the weather reports, it was clear that Donner Pass would be wide open until late Friday morning, so I just needed to get across Utah and far enough into Nevada that I could reach the California line early-ish on Friday. I crept through Salt Lake City's evening rush hour, hit the state line, and then found that I-80 in eastern Nevada was ice-free and more or less empty of cars. This was the point at which I learned that this car was even better than I'd thought. First of all, 577 turbocharged horsepower is just about enough when you're climbing a steep mountain grade at altitude and you come upon nervous Explorer-driving octogenarians timidly attempting to pass big rigs chugging uphill at 35 per; stand on the gas in the AMG E63 and you'll zip past that shit like The Snake versus an airport tug. And it's civilized power; other than your eyes going out of focus from the acceleration g-forces, you don't feel like you're in a car that can do an 11.7-second (!) quarter mile. By way of comparison, my '65 Impala art car had 400 horses at most, and it felt like the end of the world under full throttle. Well done, AMG! We hereby forgive you for the Debonair AMG.
Speaking of things that make this car ideal for long road trips, the Adaptive Highbeam Assist system on the welding-arc-bright LED headlights works flawlessly every time; basically, you turn on the highbeams at night, and they refocus themselves—not dip to low-beams, actually reshaping the beams—to avoid blinding other drivers. One less thing to worry about for your fatigued driver who spent the day trying to talk traveling companions into burning one of their cars at the roadside. I feel certain that a 20-straight-hour drive in this car would be no big deal; having done such drives in stuff like early Civics and late-1960s mid-size Fords, I feel like I have a good basis for comparison.
I decided to spend the night in Winnemucca, Nevada, about halfway across the state. The next morning, I got up early and took a zero-stress drive to Donner Pass. I thought about taking advantage of Nevada's nearly deserted roads to go for a top-speed run, but decided that jail time and/or a destroyed six-figure-price-tag car might not be worth it (plus I have a sentimental attachment to my all-time personal highest non-race-track speed record, set many years ago on US 50 in Nevada in a Volvo 940 Turbo wagon and easily surpassed by the E63 AMG).
Donner Pass, no cannibalism necessary!
A few hours later, I was in my old hometown of Alameda, the Island That Rust Forgot, posing the filthy-but-unbowed Benz next to one of the first cars I shot for the Down On The Street series.
At Sears Point—I mean Race Sonoma—the next day, I continued my tradition of posing review cars with a LeMons race car made by the same manufacturer. How about a mid-engined, Chrysler 440-powered 300D? Naturally, the racers were very much impressed by my car, though they were sad that I hadn't stuck with the K-Car and Checker (both of which showed up later on Saturday).
Let's just say that a 577-hp wagon covered with 1300 miles of road grime at Sears Point impresses LeMons racers a lot more than, for example, a Nissan Versa Note at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.
The race went well, the Checker and K-Car were at the center of an adoring crowd all weekend, and the 50-mile drive to and from the track was made effortless by the E63 wagon. Then it was time to drive back to Denver, and I had a few things I wanted to take with me. First, my good old reliable Craftsman air compressor, which I'd left behind when I loaded up the Penske truck to move from California to Colorado back in 2010.
And my engine hoist, which also hadn't fit in the box truck and had been living for several years next to the compressor in my long-suffering parents' garage.
I'd even left my beloved "Nixon's the One" campaign poster behind when I left Tricky Dick's home state. That, along with a vast selection of quality judicial bribes donated by generous racers seeking blind justice, was going into the back of the wagon as well. Everything fit with a bit of fiddling, and the E63's suspension was indifferent to the additional few hundred pounds in the back.
Ready to go! I tell you what, don't even mess around with the sedan if you're looking at an E63 AMG. Get the wagon.
Back to Donner Pass, where the force-fed V-8 didn't worry about the thin air at 7227 feet. Did you know that you can buy "Donner Burgers" at the cafe at the summit? Yeah, that's an ill-considered food name.
Interstate 80 in Nevada on a beautiful winter day in this car is about the easiest drive imaginable. My plan was to spend the night in Wendover, but I felt fresh enough after the first nine or so hours of driving to push all the way to Denver in one manic shot.
But I was in no hurry, so I decided to stop at a site that has great significance for my family: I-80 just west of Battle Mountain, Nevada.
Almost 41 years earlier to the day, my parents—like so many Midwesterners after a California visit in winter—sold the house, quit their jobs, bought a brand-new 1973 Chevrolet Beauville passenger van, and set off from Minneapolis to the San Francisco Bay Area with six-year-old me and my four- and five-year-old sisters in the back and 1972's greatest hit on the Delco AM radio.
Just outside of Battle Mountain, on black ice and in high winds—remarkably similar to the conditions I'd experienced a few days before between Rawlins and Rock Springs in Wyoming—my mom lost control of the Beauville and skidded off the road. The van went into a ditch and came to a halt upside-down, wheels still spinning and radio still playing December 1972's number-one song. My sisters and I had been unbelted (times were different then) and dozing on a mattress in the back of the van at the time, but nobody had any injuries worse than bruises and minor cuts. The Nevada Highway Patrol showed up right away and took us into Battle Mountain, and we took a rental car to Reno and then a flight to Oakland.
As for the Beauville, it was towed to the nearest Chevrolet dealer and repaired completely (other than a sliding door that never quite worked right after the rollover). It stayed in the family for another decade, sat in gas lines in 1973 and 1979, took countless family trips to ice-free California vacation spots, and stuck around long enough for me to crash it as a 16-year-old.
This is the sort of thing you have the luxury of contemplating, nine hours into a road trip in a car that inflicts just about zero punishment on the driver. And when you stop the E63 AMG at the side of an empty Nevada highway, you have the luxury of getting back in and doing a hard launch that takes you to 60 mph in less than four seconds.
We are living in the Golden Age of Engines, and this is the proof. Were I a rich man, I'd buy one of these and drop it in a Heckflosse coupe.
Nice job, Stefan. I picture you as a jovial, plump, white-haired Austrian with a set of micrometers handed down from your clockmaker father, but you're probably a lean 35-year-old with a master's degree in engineering.
Because this is a car review, in spite of my lengthy digressions, I must point out some flaws in this car, in the interest of balance. All right, so this warning message popped up near Powell, Wyoming (where—if I may digress some more—I own a '68 Ford Torino GT with 428 Cobra Jet engine). Yeah, service needed on a hundred-grand car with 4000 miles on the clock isn't so encouraging, but if you're going to buy a fiendishly complex German car with state-of-the-art everything, you've got to expect the occasional visit to the shop. If you can't handle that, there are plenty of soporifically competent Japanese luxury cars out there.
The instruments and driver's controls are, frankly, what you'd expect from a country that feels comfortable with 29-syllable compound words: very complicated. However, the whole setup is organized quite sensibly, and you always have that electronic driver's manual, which probably would be about 2000 pages long if printed, to provide guidance.
From Wendover to Denver was an easy run, and the next day I washed the car and went around my neighborhood looking for a good spot to take a few photos without a thick layer of road schmutz hiding those pretty lines. Here's the building that once housed Denver's Willys-Overland dealership, before Willys production moved to Brazil.
Mean-looking, but classy enough to avoid offending the neighbors (not that I worry much about offending my neighbors with my vehicular choices).
I had to give the car back to Mercedes-Benz a week after I first set eyes on it, and the idea of saying farewell hurt a bit. If I had unlimited funds and had to choose an all-around car for everyday use, I think I'd choose the Tesla Model S P85 by a very narrow margin, but if I had a lifestyle that mandated a lot of long highway drives with steep mountains and all the rest, it would be the E63 AMG S-Model 4MATIC wagon for sure.
A total of 3163 miles were driven over the course of a week, and I got nearly 19 indicated mpg in a luxury car with close to 600 horses. Yes, 2014 is almost over—sorry about the late review—but the 2015 version of this car isn't much different. You should get one.
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/nSHy27
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