If you head over to Mercedes-Benz’s online configurator, you may be surprised to see that at least temporarily, there’s no AMG C 63 available for you to build. For now, the most powerful C-Class that you can order is the less extreme 2023 Mercedes-AMG C 43. It wasn’t too long ago that the baby AMG’s performance figures would have been seriously impressive and not second-best. After all, the 2023 C 43 makes 402 hp and 369 lb-ft of torque, and it’ll hit 60 mph in 4.6 seconds.
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The 2023 C 43 will also cost you didn’t-that-used-to-be-C63 money, as it starts at $61,050 if you include the $1,150 destination charge. For comparison, that’s a few thousand dollars more than the 2023 BMW M340i’s starting price of $57,395 including destination. Then again, the C 43 is all-wheel drive and doesn’t offer a rear-drive version like BMW does. And the M340i also makes less power, cranking out 382 hp and 368 lb-ft of torque. On the other hand, the BMW is said to be quicker, launching from zero to 60 mph in a manufacturer-claimed 4.4 seconds.
Another big difference between the two is the engine itself. While the M340i is powered by a 3.0-liter turbo inline-six, the Mercedes uses a 2.0-liter turbo inline-four. It’s a very fancy inline-four, though, which Mercedes says uses an electric exhaust-gas turbocharger that “is a direct derivative of the technology used by the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team and provides spontaneous response across the entire rpm range.” It also gets a belt-driven starter/generator that can give the C 43 a temporary 13-hp boost.
You get a good number of standard features, too, including heated front seats, a leather-wrapped steering wheel, a biometric fingerprint scanner, adaptive LED headlights, a surround-view camera system, blind spot monitoring and a windshield washer fluid heater. But the most interesting item, from a performance perspective, is the standard rear-steer system, which should make the C 43 both more agile and easier to park.
Upgrade from the base Premium trim to the $62,700 Pinnacle trim, and you get augmented reality navigation, a head-up display, a Burmeister sound system and wireless charging. Both versions are now on sale, so there’s no need to place an order and wait until next year for deliveries to begin.
