Take one Mercedes twin-turbo V8. Give it a stupid, ungodly amount of power. Take the noise straight out of a Camaro SS. And then make the entire thing look like an enormous dick. That’s the , and I think I’m in love with it.

(Mercedes wanted me to drive the AMG GT S so bad that I asked for one when I went to a recent wedding in Miami for the weekend. I paid for the plane ticket and the Air BnB, Mercedes paid for a tank of gas. And I guess the car.)

Yes, I know, you might think it’s easy to fall in love with a car that costs $154,200. For that price, you damn well better be in love with it, right?

But that actually couldn’t be further from the truth. Consider the Always and Eternal Lord Of Our Hearts, the Miata, which at just under 25 grand isn’t exactly going to set a Miami club-goer’s hair on fire.

The more expensive a car tends to be, the more car companies seem to focus on making them more more. More power. More electronics. More bells and whistles. More steering modes. More throttle input selections. More things removing you from the road. More designers trying to make a car look appealing to everyone, and taking all the drama out of it.

So how do you make a car this expensive, this wild, this over-the-top, and still make it absolutely great?

I’m still not sure how Mercedes did it, but the Mercedes-AMG GT S, incredibly dumb name and all, is great.

Greatness, of course, has to be contextualized. The AMG GT, of course, has got some context, too. Within Mercedes itself, the company’s made a slew of ridiculous two-seater velocity demons over the past decade or so, beyond even the normal pinnacle that makes up the AMG nameplate. There was the SLR, made in conjunction with McLaren, and the SLS, made in conjunction with itself.