Imagine for a moment that cars were celebrities. The Tesla Model X, for example, would have to be well-heeled eco-warrior Leonardo DiCaprio. The muscle-bound Hummer? That's got Vin Diesel written all over it. The Toyota Corolla? Tricky, but we'd have to go with… wait, what was his name again?

And the boxy behemoth that is the Mercedes-AMG G63? It can't be anyone but Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I mean, just look at. It's big, it's angular, it's tougher than a sack of German concrete, plus it's worth a sizeable chunk of cash. Hell, if it could talk, it would surely have a thick Austrian accent.

Proving you can, in fact, sprinkle the AMG fairy dust over just about anything, the G63 is hiding a whopping great V8 engine under its bonnet, and one that's capable of pushing this incredible hulk from 0-100km/h with hard-to-believe speed. It's properly, properly quick for a car that's shaped a bit like a shipping container.

But to simply talk about out-and-out speed would be to do the G63 a disservice, because Mercedes-AMG promises us this big beastie is just about the most capable thing it's ever made, and that it'll be able to monster anything we're brave enough to point it towards.

And as we're at the world's biggest cold-weather testing facility - a winter wonderland known as the Snow Farm, perched atop a mountain near Queenstown, NZ - there's no shortage of things to test our bravery.

At the world's biggest cold-weather testing facility there's no shortage of things to test our bravery.

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