2013 Mercedes-Benz GL550

 2013 Mercedes-Benz GL550

 2013 Mercedes-Benz GL550

 2013 Mercedes-Benz GL550

 2013 Mercedes-Benz GL550

GL-Class SUV with top-spec luxury amenities that is perfectly suited for the daily driving needs of a dad or a mom (68-percent dads, according to 2011 figures) and with what we can only believe is a very nice 362-horsepower V8 engine. What the company sent our way, however, was a heavily blinged, huge-wheeled, 429-horsepower pleasure wagon that is just as well-suited to creating babies as toting them around, should your amorous instincts be triggered by the pimp-level of your whip. The GL550 is the real deal, if the deal you're looking for involves carting kiddies and/or hauling ass. We really only had need of the latter during our one-week loan of the thing, sadly.

A full four of them lived about 150 miles from our Metro Detroit base of operations, in the western corner of Michigan called St. Joseph. All of them were interested in finding a sucker buddy to drive them around on a tour of some local wineries. This would also prove an entertaining time to test the performance boasts of this remarkably rapid V8 sport ute, we thought. Plans were made, a weekend was selected and the GL550 showed up just in the nick of time for our fall tour.

The redesigned 2013 GL500 is a vehicle that is well suited to make a strong impression on folks of all kinds, whether they generally care about cars or not. For a start, there is still an undeniable cache associated with that Benz logo on the grille – something that is more easily sensed in the parts of Midwest America that don't see the three-pointed star quite so frequently. (The suburbs of Detroit don't flip for the big M-B quite so much as the sticks around St. Joseph, Michigan, for instance.) 

The inherent impressiveness of a Mercedes is matched by the size, scale and design of this new GL, which manages to look pretty rugged and refined at the same time. Those who know their off-roading stuff might laugh a little at the GL550's 21-inch five-spoke AMG wheels, but they really do give the SUV an impressive stance, and add quite a lot of overall gravitas to the vehicle. We actually think that the sharply creased bodylines Mercedes seems so fond of nowadays work a bit better when scaled up to GL size than they do on the smaller GLK. At any rate, the neighbors seemed to dig it.