Mercedes-AMG’s next supercar isn’t going to be powered by one of its typical fire-breathing, eardrum-rupturing V8s. Instead, AMG’s next supercar will be uncharacteristically silent. “It’s clear that we are going all-electric,” AMG CEO Michael Schiebe told Autocar. You might think such news will disappoint AMG customers, who are used to some of the gnarliest V8s on the planet, but Schiebe believes otherwise.
“Customers who came to the brand because of the V8 did not come because they just wanted to have a big engine,” said Schiebe. “They came because they loved the technology that we put into the car. So when it comes to electric driving, I’m pretty sure they will jump into that new technology because it will be the latest and greatest that you can get.”
I don’t want to sound like I know more about AMG customers than AMG, but did those buyers really come for the tech, not the big engines? AMG was founded by two former Mercedes engineers to build V8 racing engines. It eventually moved on to creating engines for Mercedes’ high-performance road cars. In the early 2000s, Mercedes bought AMG (while under DaimlerChrysler) and began making Mercedes-AMG models that were almost exclusively V8-powered. While AMG now makes other engines, big, violent V8s have always been the backbone of the brand, from its earliest days until now. The idea that customers bought AMGs for anything other than their handbuilt V8s is certainly surprising.
When you pop the hood of a Mercedes-AMG, there’s a little metal plaque on the engine that says “Handcrafted by,” along with the name of the engine builder, as each AMG engine is assembled by hand by a single person. It’s part of the brand’s “One man, one engine” philosophy. So AMG doesn’t only take pride in its engines’ performance, but also their quality.
In Schiebe’s defense, what else could he say? He can’t drop a quote like “AMG customers really want V8s but the board says we can’t make ’em anymore so they’re gonna have to get used to EVs.” Yet that’s the harsh reality facing the industry at the moment. If the brand wants to compete in the future, AMG needs to start cranking out high-performance EVs. And its electric supercar will undoubtedly have immense performance. Its axial-flux motors come from Yasa (the manufacturer of the axial-flux motors in the Koenigsegg Regera), which Mercedes recently acquired. And the Yasa-AMG motors reportedly make 489 horsepower and 590 lb-ft of torque, while weighing just 53 pounds. Imagine the power that three or four of those things could deliver.
Will each motor come with its own little metal plaque, signed by an engineer? Maybe, actually. “This is part of our DNA. We will have something in the future which is comparable to ‘one man, one engine,’ and it will not be just a marketing effort,” Schiebe told Autocar.
So hope isn’t entirely lost for AMG’s future performance cars, even without V8s. However, true AMG fans would likely give up plenty of power and performance for the brand’s signature rumble.
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