Mercedes-Benz CLS-Class

AMG is exceptionally good at the power thing. Indelicate, indiscriminate, and absolutely terrifying, it's the automotive equivalent of operation shock and awe.

This latest offering is the CLS 63, a car that ably perpetuates the AMG legacy of looking, sounding and going like it was specced up by Satan as a birthday present for Donald Rumsfeld. That '63' denotes the vast 6208cc capacity for a totally new, handbuilt V8.

It's good for 507bhp, 464lb ft of torque and the sort of acceleration that instils in you an overwhelming paranoia about Plod. You drive the CLS 63 around like a caricature of criminality, shiftily searching this way and that for a safe moment to plant your right foot.

The 62mph benchmark is dispatched in 4.5 seconds, the limiter set at 155mph. But it's what goes on in between that which really gets the guilt pulsing through your veins. There's so much seamless grunt through the sevenspeed auto 'box that it's nigh on impossible to avoid some major law breaking in your own street.

We love the CLS, but this AMG effort is patently ridiculous. It costs £72,995, almost £30,000 more than a boggo petrol or diesel, and all that power does little in the real world for what is still essentially just an executive cruiser. In hell, however, the minicabs are probably all CLS 63 AMGs, waiting kerbside for Rumsfeld and his cronies.

Matt Master