At Autocar, we do our share of fun, crazy things. It’s true that we’re serious purveyors of all things automotive, but that does not stop us from letting our hair down from time to time. We’ve taken supercars to the highest motorable road in the world and even driven across continents in one stretch.
Fun, as many people will tell you, is addictive. As we sat, itching for our next instalment, imagine our joy when the Mercedes-Benz GLE 450 AMG Coupe came back to us for a couple of days.
The GLE 450 AMG is not the full Mercedes-AMG package (that would be the GLE 63 S), but don’t let that dampen your spirits. It is still a very capable machine, with an AMG-tuned V6 and a war-chest of high-tech equipment. It has been developed to rival the BMW X6, and thus, is as much of a style statement and fun-deliverer as it is a performance vehicle.
This special car needed a special place. So, we took it to a small town called Dhanushkodi, one that sits on a jetty-like strip of Indian land jutting into the ocean from the jagged coast of Tamil Nadu, a mere 28 kilometres from the coast of Sri Lanka. With floors of white sand flanked by clear, turquoise waters, it came quite close to the idea of paradise.
However, Dhanushkodi offered us something far more exciting than its Polynesia-like beauty. The areas around this little town were a veritable mix of great sand dunes, shallow lagoons, straight, flat, uncluttered stretches of tarmac and forests of casuarina trees interspersed with red mud trails.
So, there we were – a stunning SUV-sports coupé crossover with a diverse variety of terrains to drive it on. Sounds like a recipe for fun? Well, yes, but no. You see, due to our line of work, sometimes even the most exotic cars and extreme terrains feel jaded. We needed something else to benchmark our car against. So naturally, we threw an airplane in the mix.
