There’s a new performance Mercedes in town that’s wearing a lot less camouflage than when we last spotted a GLE SUV.
Mercedes defines the GLE as a luxury crossover SUV. It can come in crossover-coupe style, which is some bizarre bulbous thing that scares children, or it can come in the style you see here which is crossover SUV style.
The only problem with this is it completely removes any meaning from the word “crossover”--not that it had much meaning to begin with.
All automotive linguistic complaints aside, here we have the upcoming performance version of the GLE crossover, the Mercedes-AMG GLE 63. We can tell it’s the performance version thanks to the spiffy quad-pack of square exhaust tips and the larger air intakes. It wouldn’t be AMG without a big, honkin’ engine under the hood.
There’s not a whole lot of camouflage on this particular test mule, but what is covered doesn’t seem to be concealing much. The overall body shape and silhouette is still the same GLE we’ve known since yesteryear, with the biggest update coming to the car’s side panels. Much like the regular GLE we saw last May, the GLE 63 is going to have its sides smoothed out with the removal of its formerly prominent creases.
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In the front, things seem mostly unchanged with the same grille and bumper as before. The headlights seem to be slightly updated with the same design of LEDs as from the E-Class sedan. The rear is covered up a bit better than the front, but we don’t expect any big surprises there either.
As for what’s under the hood, that we don’t know. The GLE 63 is rumored to be getting the same engine as on the performance versions of the E-Class, and that means a 4.0-L twin-turbo V8 that packs close to 612 hp. In contrast, the tamer GLE 53 is likely to get a new inline 6-cylinder that’s just above the 400 pony power point.
Although there’s very little camouflage, we don’t expect Mercedes to grace us with the AMG version of the GLE first. Look for the regular GLE to debut later this year, while the 2020 GLE 63 will take a bow sometime in 2019.