The Mercedes-Benz CL63 AMG

It's been a while since graduate school but I'll try to do justice to this idea: Among the works of some 20th-century French philosophers—particularly Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault, who were pretty out-there cats, believe you me—there was the notion of the limit-experience. To court a limit-experience is to seek out a sensation that, in its raw intensity (fear, pain, pleasure, vertigo), tears the veil of common perception, and in that moment the individual confronts the true, undisguised nature of reality. Foucault called it "de-subjectifying the subject."

The limit-experience idea has shown up in the literature of war and extreme sports, invoked by all manner of adrenaline junkies attempting to intellectualize their dangerous ways. But Mercedes-Benz is the first company to commodify it. The car in question is the 2011 CL63 AMG, a tail-dancing cyclone of a luxury coupe that does everything well but does one thing so grandly that it borders on the surreal, the uncanny. It accelerates. A lot. Imagine God plays jai alai, and you're the ball.


I'm happy to drill down into the specifics of exactly how the CL63 accelerates, because there's poetry in that, too. New for this model-year is a twin-turbo, direct-injection 5.5-liter V8—replacing the previous 6.2-liter, naturally aspirated V8—and basically the new engine is a high-tech blast furnace.

But it's not just acceleration. To line this car up on an empty highway and roll on the throttle is to experience a unique, Newtonian effervescence, a momentary microgravity when the 4,800-pound dreadnaught around you disappears and you float in a kind of parabolic apogee of pleasure.

This is the multiplexed joy of a conjugal visit in a high-speed elevator, of being fired from a Roman catapult into a mattress of cocaine, of pulling your ripcord to find a winning lottery ticket attached to it. I don't know. It's crazy. This car is crystalline, pharmaceutical-grade acceleration, an amour-fou of bliss and leverage. Suddenly, all of existence is reduced to simple clarity: F=MA.



Sleek, menacing, beautiful, a diamond-tipped hollow-point of a car, the CL63 AMG is certainly one of the world's best automobiles. Still, I'm not sure hyper-speed ought to be so sanitized, so accessible to just any codger with a checkbook. All I know is that my driver's license would last about a week if I owned this car. It's not philosophy, but there's wisdom in that.

--The Wall Street Journal