Last year, at the Geneva Motor Show, Mercedes-AMG revealed their first in-house four-door model following the two-door GT coupe to succeed the SLS. Confusingly, they called it the AMG GT Concept, a name that had no allusions to it being a saloon.
As a refresher, it then bore a striking resemblance to the upcoming CLS Class and shared some proportional parallels with the W213 E-Class, leaving us to wonder just how bespoke this new model was meant to be.
These core questions haven’t been answered definitively as of yet, nearly a year after the initial concept vehicle was shown. However, we don’t have to wait a whole lot longer for these revelations to come to light since, according to Autocar, AMG are rather close to showing a near-finished production version in March, at this year’s Geneva Motor Show.
The forthcoming big reveal was uttered by none other than Tobias Moers, the head of the increasingly large AMG division under Mercedes-Benz, during the debut of the CLS 53 - a kind of halfway high-performance model to, ostensibly, sit alongside this AMG GT saloon.
Being a flagship product, this car will naturally offer much more performance than the CLS 53 - which uses a 3.0-litre turbocharged inline-6 with 320kW. However, it will share its leaning toward a more electrified powertrain, but leveraging multiple electric motors and high capacity batteries to deliver levels of power and torque previously uncharted by the German marque.
Mercedes-AMG is conceiving this upcoming model as a response to both the current second-generation Porsche Panamera (which as a hybrid as its most powerful permutation) as well as their upcoming fully electric saloon, the Mission E.
As such, this new AMG will feature a bevy of electrified powertrain options that sit under the umbrella of Mercedes-Benz’s EQ Power brand, offer differing levels power outputs, battery capacities, and therefore, fully electric range, designed together with High Performance Powertrains, a sister company that’s responsible for AMG’s F1-powered Project One hybrid hypercar.
At the top of the heap is reported to be a 600kW (total system output) beast that combines a 4.0-litre M178 twin-turbocharged V8 that’s supplemented by an electric motor likely to help drive the rear wheels, offering up to 50km of zero emissions range. This version, alas, will not be available at initial launch despite.
Rather, we can expect the debutant variant to have a powertrain that largely mirrors the current E63 S 4Matic. That is, a 4.0-litre bi-turbo V8 with 450kW/850Nm, all-wheel drive, and a high-voltage electric architecture to support an electric compressor to boost power and perform torque fill where the conventional exhaust gas-driven turbine falls short.
The larger implication of this shift toward electrification of their most high-performance models is that these powertrains are being developed to be compact, self-contained, and modular, allowing AMG to more easily have them proliferate across multiple existing models without major engineering expense. It is largely accepted, though, that this new electrified powertrain will be at the core of the next AMG GT.
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