FLY THE COUPES

LET’S PRETEND, FOR a moment, that Charles Darwin was a petrol head. If we exhumed his corpse and zapped him back to life, what do you think he would say about these three? The Audi RS Q8, Porsche Cayenne GTS Coupe and Mercedes-AMG GLE 63 S Coupe are guilty of seeming even more nonsensical than a performance SUV thanks to their slicked back silhouettes. But they offer a crucial insight into natural selection.

In 2019, the Audi RS Q8 smashed the original R8 V10 Plus lap time around the ’Ring by two seconds when it set a record lap for an SUV. This required an amount of performance engineering that would have been unthinkable to pour into an SUV, let alone a coupe variant, two decades ago.

But when the world is mad enough to will a $390,000 Lamborghini coupe SUV into existence, that should tell you something about the rising demand for these steroidal oddities. Mercedes-Benz says, for example, it has buyers who come to the brand specifically for the AMG GLE Coupe and nothing else.

Although our GLE 63 S Coupe arrives with no record lap time to flaunt, it does break ground in other ways. The fourth-generation GLE is the first time Mercedes-Benz has built the Coupe on a different wheelbase. By shortening it six centimetres, buyers get a more specific product, further differentiating performance