Mercedes-Benz E63 AMG photo leak

The images suggest the car is set to debut soon, possibly as early as this month’s New York Motor Show and go on sale overseas shortly after that.

The images show the styling is more aggressive than the current E63 AMG, and add an angular air dam, squared off headlights and foglights, sharper specced-up wheels, and squared quad exhaust tips rather than oval ones.

The E63 AMG is said to carry the Mercedes-Benz 6.2-litre V8 seen in the current model and the C63 AMG, but reportedly generating 386kW of power and 630Nm of torque – 8kW more than the current E63 but the same torque. It is likely to be mated to the AMG Speedshift seven-speed sequential automatic transmission putting drive to the rear wheels.

Performance should be blistering, with a 0-100km/h time of around 4.5 seconds, but with top speed electronically limited to 250km/h.

Reports say Merc has also trimmed the fuel consumption of the engine by 12 per cent for the E63, which should bring in a figure of about 12.3l/100km.

 Mercedes-Benz Australia spokesman David McCarthy says they are very keen to get the car here, and don’t see any obstacles to that happening.

“There’s already a lot of buyer interest in the E63 AMG,” McCarthy says.

“But we won’t get the car for some time. It will possibly debut in New York … it will be available in Europe in July, then the right-hand drive program starts after that. So we should get it in January of 2010.”

McCarthy says it’s too early to talk about the price point, but bearing in mind how competitive the carmaker is, we can expect that effort will be made to have it not stray too far above the current car’s level of about $245,000.

“We can’t predict what will happen with the currency exchange rates, so we don’t know exactly where it will sit,” McCarthy says.

“But even bearing in mind that this will have more spec, what we’ve done with the C-Class we’ll continue with the E-Class – we’d hope it won’t be much more than the current car.”

McCarthy says it’s expected that the E63 AMG will be part of the “AMG-led recovery for Mercedes-Benz”.

“What we’ve seen with AMG is the while everyone’s sales are down, AMG is maintaining its percentage. When the economy does start to recover, a lot of that is going to come from entrepreneurs and traditionally they buy this sort of vehicle.

“They want to reward themselves and cars like our AMGs are how they do it."

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In the garage: Mercedes Benz C63 AMG