2024 Mercedes-AMG GT Coupe First Drive Review: Better when faster

GRANADA, Spain — On the first day of the 2024 Mercedes-AMG GT Coupe media drives, I spurred the (genuine two-door) coupe through Spanish mountain roads outside Granada. I’ve spoken before of today’s super sports cars being too much for public roads — 100 pounds of ‘roids in a 20-pound sack. One needs a pressure suit, tower clearance and immunity from prosecution to approach their potential. Well, here is another: an Affalterbach big boy with an afterburner engine, its size and weight uniquely unsuited to humping over spindly Iberian roads with their byzantine zig-zags, their coarse, bumpy tarmac, their numerous, simultaneous cambers and their surprise herds of goats.

Worse, it was as awkward as an NFL offensive tackle asked to flamenco. Its multiplex systems kept me pointed the correct way, but did so by interrupting power delivery and dynamics in ways I couldn’t predict.

There was no way AMG had forgotten how to engineer a sinuous — if portly — driver’s car. I drove a GT in 2016, and other than it being stiffer than a crowbar, it was a hoot to hustle. Colleague James Riswick praised the AMG GT R. The AMG GT Black Series almost never met a heart it couldn’t win.

Enter Katrin, with AMG PR. During dinner that first evening, she asked what I thought of the drive. I did the most polite thing I could think of, answering her question with: “Can I complain?” Then I did just that, and in more detail than outlined above. My TEDx talk concluded, she said, “You need to speak to René.”

That was the beginning of how I learned to delight in the 2024 AMG GT.

But let’s start with the breakdown. The second-generation AMG GT Coupe embodies what the company calls “a new dimension concept.” This means customers wanted back seats for familial and pecuniary reasons — the potential to load kids or tiny dogs, and the real boon of lower insurance rates levied on a 2+2 vs. a two-seater. As a result, the AMG GT can be had as either, albeit with the latter possessing a parcel shelf instead of the vestigial seats.

The all-new coupe combines and distills AMG and Mercedes products that preceded it. The new multi-metal and composite platform shares nothing with the previous AMG GT, but is the same