The explosive acceleration must lead passers-by to think there’s now a nitrous-powered G-class… but this Mercedes is nothing if not reliable. We’re in our element on the highway to Stuttgart, the G55 greedily devouring the bitumen to the accompaniment of the AMG 500 tuba player. The large G-class surges forward and the speed grows to three figures as, sitting upright as in a truck, I struggle to hold our course straight over the bumps.
We’re off: and those eight cylinders respond loudly, flogging the crankshaft 40,000 times per minute as the rev-counter reaches 5,000. It is timeless: the familiar levers and switches in the places one intuitively expects.Īhead of me is the name sign of Affalterbach, crossed with a red bar to show we are leaving. The build materials, the clear arrangement of the instruments – nothing is playful or over-designed. "Click, click!" answers the driver's door with a solid, metallic sound. Not so the G55 AMG which also, unloaded, offers the performance of a rather good sports car: 0-62mph in just 5.5 seconds. If we add fuel, a heavy load, and the maximum trailer weight, then the G55 faces a challenge of some 6.5 tons. This G55 packs enough power and torque to turn the four-wheel drive transmission, in inexpert hands, to dust – so the vehicle trusts instead an extremely robust 5-speed automatic gearbox to help propel the 2,550kg (when empty of fuel) along smoothly. We are in Affalterbach, at the Mercedes AMG customer centre, and before us is the latest high-performance G-class, the current G55 AMG Kompressor. It’s those round bi-xenon headlights that do it, their peaceful gaze replacing the more open-faced stare of earlier models. It looks almost innocent, this supercharged 5.5-litre, V8-engined machine, with its 493bhp and 700Nm of torque.
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