The Mercedes-Benz GLE 350 is a 255-horsepower five-seat SUV that you'll see ferrying kids to and from school in upper-middle-class (and upper-class) neighborhoods.
This has the same body. It is not the same vehicle.
No, this is the Mercedes-AMG GLE 53. AMG, for the uninitiated, is Mercedes-Benz' in-house tuning department. They've taken the GLE and popped in a turbocharged 3.0-liter inline six-cylinder with a mild hybrid boost. 429 horsepower. 364 lb-ft of torque. Zero to 60 in 5.2 seconds. A top speed of 155 miles per hour. And thanks to a nine-speed automatic transmission and that mild hybrid, respectable EPA fuel economy numbers---18 city/22 highway. AMG also works some suspension magic to make all that extra power controllable.
Inside, it's all the good stuff you'd find in any Mercedes-Benz GLE, but dialed up a few notches with AMG-specific trim.
If you could find one with zero options, it's probably the performance bargain of the year at $73,550. Our tester didn't come that way. It came with $26,480 in extra-cost options---an exhaustive enough list for me to bring back our old feature of the window sticker at the end of the review so you can see for yourself what that money buys.
With $1,050 destination and delivery, the as-tested price of the 2022 Mercedes-AMG GLE 52 is $101,080.
At first blush, that number seems steep---but there are a lot of low-six figure SUVs rolling around these days---and few with the combination of luxury and power available in the 2022 Mercedes-AMG GLE 53.
