To be abundantly clear right off the bat: I would own a Mercedes-Benz E-Class. Big fan. Now that’s out of the way, I can tell you why I would absolutely not choose the 2025 Mercedes-AMG E 53 Hybrid.
Newsweek was invited to be among the first in the world to experience the new car, and I took it for an extended one-day drive from Stuttgart south, deep into the Austrian Alps.
Leaving the home of Mercedes-Benz, we traveled mostly on the Autobahn at unlimited speeds for the first two hours of the trip. The time and kilometers flew by.
The car’s 577 horsepower, turbocharged 3.0-liter six-cylinder engine is paired with a battery pack to deliver an Environmental Protection Agency-estimated 42 miles of all-electric range. On the Autobahn, the car performed valiantly, mostly in hybrid mode, accelerating rapidly when called upon and easily holding its lane. Steering was properly weighted for the speed.
It was when the highway ended and the two-lane road started that the most uninspiring characteristics of the AMG E came through.
Mercedes-Benz
Mercedes-Benz
While acceleration was steady and without lag or lurch, the E-Class could not escape its comfortable cruiser status. Sure, it was powerful, but it didn’t feel fun. None of the driving pleasure that was expected was achieved. It was all familiar having driven the less powerful E 450 a few weeks ago.
Steering between 35 and 55 mph (miles per hour) was too loose, even with the car in Sport mode. When calibrated properly, driving a sedan up winding mountain roads at moderate speed can be a delightfully aggressive challenge. Here, it was not, despite being equipped with variable all-wheel drive and rear-axle steering.
This was perhaps the biggest disappointment of the entire experiment. It seems like such an easy thing to have remedied, after all, the engineers in Affalterbach, Germany, where AMG is headquartered, are surrounded by good roads where these types of speeds are the norm.
It’s almost as if AMG was so sustainability and speed focused with the plug-in that they forgot that the core of what makes a sports car sporty isn’t straight line acceleration or power figures, but a combination of those with handling and agility.
As road salt built up on the windshield, squirting the cleaner then using the wipers was effective but the extra drops of liquid the wipers consistently splattered all over the passenger side when performing its task, this was inexcusable and annoying.
In my two hours in the passenger seat, I came to dislike that side’s touchscreen setup more than I did when I first drove the E-Class in Vienna last year. The size of the screen encroaches on the passenger compartment making it feel less spacious than it should be for a midsize sedan.
As a driver, I was even more annoyed by it. Having not arrived in the Alps until after dark, my concentration needed to be on the road. Instead, my passenger flicking through app options on the bright screen repeatedly drew my attention away from the road.
The core parts of the E-Class remain despite it having an AMG badge. The suspension soaks up bumps in the road. It’s pleasantly elegant inside and out, despite the gloss black fascia elements AMG specified the tester with. That said, it’s not aggressive looking.
Mercedes-Benz
Mercedes-Benz
The 2025 Mercedes-AMG E 53 Hybrid starts at $88,000, an $18,000 premium over the 2025 Mercedes-Benz E 450. As tested, the price was more than $110,000.
I’m sure that if you take the E 53 to a track, you can throttle and thrash the hell out of it and have a rollicking good time. But, most people won’t do that. They buy the car for the AMG badge, enjoy the added bit of performance and go about their errand running ways.
But honestly, it’s just not worth the money for most people. The car is not different enough from the E-Class to be compelling, and where its performance really matters as a daily driver, it completely fails to make an argument.
If low emissions is what you’re after, this plug-in hybrid model has it. That’s about the only reason I can think of to buy the AMG E-Class over the E 450 or a Porsche Panamera 4 E-Hybrid (it has 30 miles of all-electric range), which is about the same price when options are considered on the AMG.
