Though it looks like—and weighs as much as—a full-grown ocean sun fish, smells like melted crayons, features a cabin littered with sticky delaminating buttons, and was typically filled, in period, with bratty pre-tweens squirting each other with tubes of Go-Gurt and arguing over which Disney Channel DVD to play on their seatback screens, the Mercedes R63 has always held a uncanny allure to me.
While I am a childless urban homosexual, I have made no secret of my affection for minivans, and have published broadly on the subject, plumbing the depths of their bizarre design histories, corralling relenting worshipers of their flexibility, and overprizing their inventiveness and gadgetry. So when Mercedes-Benz offered me the opportunity to drive their sidelong entry into the marginal category of hot-rod “sports tourer”—the 507hp, 6.3-liter naturally-aspirated V8-powered, all-wheel-drive, four-door, six-passenger 2007 R63—from LA to Pebble Beach to kick off the annual automotive bacchanal known as Monterey Car Week, I did not dither.
Like lobster ice cream, or indoor desert ski slopes, the R63 is an audacious and wondrously horrible idea. It is nearly impossible to imagine the product planning meeting in which the R63 was hatched, but its basic blueprint followed the elemental Affalterbach playbook: transplant the honkingest V8 possible into the engine bay, inoculate the chassis against acute rejection, and stand back with a pilsner giggling at the dubious results.
As with fisting, just because something bigger can fit in there, doesn’t necessarily mean it will bring pleasure. Fortunately, participants for both that act, and this car, tend to self-select. To that end, the R63 was a special-order vehicle, available only to those who were brave enough to ask their dealer to build them one. It cost nearly $90,000 in 2007 ($135,000 in today’s money), weighed 5,300 pounds when empty, and accelerated from 0-60 mph in 4.6 seconds on its way to a top speed of 155 mph. Only 200 were produced, globally, for one model year, and just over 100 made it to the States, making it rarer than the CLK Black Series, or McLaren P1.
The drive from Los Angeles to Monterey can be among the world’s most dreadful, or loveliest, route-dependent. I split the difference, avoiding the anodyne 5 that runs up California’s agro agricultural spine, and taking the coast and mountain route, but then skipping the inevitable incoming traffic bog on Highway 1 around Big Sur. This gave me the opportunity to test the R63 in the twisties, as well as its skills as a highway cruiser.
We’ll start with the good news. This thing is fucking fast. With sure-footed 4MATIC all-wheel-drive, it will smoke a contemporary V-10 M5 to 60 mph. And it pulls and pulls. On the highway, keeping your foot in it allows that delicious naturally aspirated V8 to show its legs like a gym queen in 3” running shorts. Due to the preponderance of CHiPs, seeking out exotics to ticket en-route to the MCW festivities, I did not attempt to reach V-max. But triple-digit blasts are effortless, and the 7-speed transmission, and comfy sport seats, allows all-day top gear cruising at California highway speeds, which hover around 85 or 90 mph on the less occupied stretches. We were in the car for 7 hours and felt fresh on arrival. Not new S-Class fresh, but not in need of a chiropractor.
Moreover, without the ultra-raised seating position of an SUV—it’s a half-foot lower than the 2007 ML63 crossover with which it shares its underpinnings—it’s easy to forget that you’re in a long-roofed wagony-van kind of thing, until you see everyone staring at you mouthing, “What the fuck is that?” Big brakes under 20” five-spoke wheels provide more than adequate stopping power. But this thing is long and heavy. So it’s not exactly nimble. It is relatively flat around gentle curves, but you can readily feel physics, and the lack of decades of intervening Benz crossover chassis tuning, coming into play. A canyon carver, it is not.
It is difficult for my aged self to recognize that the mid-aughts occurred twenty years ago. But the R63 reminds me of this in numerous ways. There’s no Bluetooth. The only way to plug in a phone is via a short corded 30-pin dock connecter in the glovebox. There are the aforementioned DVD screens mounted to the front seatbacks. And the nav system, while functional, is CD-based, something we realized, after the fact, when it failed to route us around a massive traffic jam approaching the Monterey Peninsula. Duh.
“This is the kind of car that, when you see one up for sale, you have to buy it,” a Mercedes Classic Center rep told us. I would disagree, personally. There are plenty of other vehicles, maybe even other minivans, I might rather own, first. But I would definitely agree with another statement the same rep made when we were pumping this beast full of $100 worth of premium, an antidote to its 14 mpg highway performance. “This car came from a moment in the company that will never be repeated.” Bless the weirdos who thought of it.
