The new AMG GT 4-Door Coupe EV weighs a crushing 2,460 kg, and stretches out to more than five metres long, with a more-than-three-metre wheelbase. Piloting such a behemoth down the ribbon-y tarmac of rural Spanish roads and the technical curves of the Ascari race track should feel like steering the Edmund Fitzgerald down a water-slide. It does not.
Instead, this big German sedan harnesses a broad swath of technologies to flatter the driver, fool the brain, and put Isaac Newton in a headlock. As Futurama‘s Zapp Branigan observed, “She’s built like a steakhouse, but handles like a bistro.” Scratch that, the GT 4-Door Coupe doesn’t really handle, nor does it dance. It is a juggernaut, and it exerts its engineering against physics with irresistible force.
Article content
Article content
Even if you can sense that there’s plenty of ones and zeroes doing heavy lifting behind the scenes, here, these cars are incredibly fast and well-composed. The GT 63 especially gathers speed on the track with warp-speed ferocity, but also offers up immense lateral grip. How lively it is depends on how you twist a series of dials, as if Frankenstein’s monster had a forehead dimmer switch that ranged from smiley emoji to red frowny face.
Article content
Article content
Article content
AMG has been producing road-going dreadnoughts for nearly
AMG has been producing road-going dreadnoughts for nearly 60 years now, ever since engineers Hans Werner Auftrech and Erhard Melcher set up their workshop just outside of Stuttgart. In those pre-merger days, the company’s greatest hits had names like Rote Sau (“Red Sow”) and “the Hammer,” V8 brutality, and crushing acceleration.
In modern times, AMG has long been absorbed into the corporate structure of Mercedes-Benz as a whole, although some Mercedes-AMG products have retained a frisson of that big-engine-shoehorned-into-small-car original recipe. However, Mercedes-AMG has just landed the youngest-ever F1 championship run to 20-year-old Kimi Antonelli, which is not something achieved with only straight-line speed.
Crafting the AMG GT 4-Door Coupe in both E63 and E55 trims was a ground-up exercise, and they’re thus closer in spirit to the AMG GT that debuted in 2014. That particular two-door sports car (note: actually a coupe, unlike these sedan wannabes) is both a creditable rival to the likes of the Porsche 911; and also has a faint echo of what the V8-powered Porsche 928 might have developed into.
- 2027 Mercedes-Benz electric C-Class gets fastback silhouette
2028 AMG GT SUV promises astonishing charge speeds- Story continues below
AMG didn’t have to adapt an existing Mercedes
AMG didn’t have to adapt an existing Mercedes model into something fast: its engineers were allowed to build from scratch, harnessing some of the battery-electric technology developed for the F1 effort. With the bodywork stripped off, the bones of the beast are hugely impressive. Multi-link suspensions front and rear are built around light and strong forged aluminum components, the curved uprights sized like a mastodon’s scapula.
Ordinarily, EV battery units are built into a flat-floored skateboard, but the GT 4-Door has what looks like a central transmission tunnel grafted on to the pack. This contains not driveshafts, but a cooling package that draws away heat towards a front exchanger, the better to manage the thermal health of each cell.
Each of these cells is made of laser-welded aluminum, measuring 105 mm by 26 mm, sitting bathed in oil that circulatestimal operating temperatures, even when under high stress, as in insanely powerful charging events (more on that in a bit). There are 2,660 of these cylinders packed into the floor, which sits low enough that this EV actually rides slightly lower than the V8-powered GT sedan
Total battery capacity for both the GT 63
Total battery capacity for both the GT 63 and GT 55 is 106 kWh, with both using three compact axial-flux motors. These last are about a third as big as a conventional radial-flux motor – presently the industry standard, including in multiple current Mercedes models – but can offer up as much as three times the power. You’d previously have found them in ultra-hybrids like the Ferrari 296 and Lamborghini Revuelto.
Here, peak power for the E 55 is 805 hp, and the E 63 a ludicrous 1,153 hp. A time-limited boost mode that adds 148 hp in the 63 and 67 hp in the 55 can be activated by pulling both paddle shifters simultaneously.
How lively the GT 63 is depends on how you twist a series of dials, as if Frankenstein’s monster had a forehead dimmer switch that ranged from smiley emoji to red frowny face
On the street, in the GT 55, this last changes from a party trick into something that feels properly AMG. Stuck behind a slow-moving Citroen panel van, with a short length of dotted centerline to pass on, dropping out of Comfort mode with a quick click of the twin shifters lets you instantly flex all the power at your disposal.
Given AMG’s long road car history of big
Given AMG’s long road car history of big engines offering up vast reserves of power when called upon, the GT 55 here absolutely demonstrates some heritage. It’s happy to loaf along as you might do in an old E-Class, then warps past whatever’s cluttering up the windscreen ahead. Because it’s electric, there’s no waiting for a downshift, just grab and go.
Further playing around with the drive modes unlocks a rising V8 soundtrack in Sport and Sport Plus. The latter lets the driver artificially click through simulated gears with the paddles, and it’s at least as well-executed as in similar systems in Hyundai’s Ioniq N products. The GT 4-Door’s seats offer haptic feedback, so the vibrations aren’t just coming through the speakers, and it’s enough to have you feeling like there might be combustion engine tucked away out front.
It’s a video-game level you might toy around with on the street, but completely unnecessary. On the track, in the GT 63, it’s a downright distraction, an added management chore when you need to be paying close attention to turn-in points. The Ascari circuit is full of blind corners, and nearly 1,200 hp gets you between them with lightning pace.
Both GT 4-Doors come with active rear steering,
Both GT 4-Doors come with active rear steering, a trick to make the car drive like it has a wheelbase closer to the two-door GT. With the two electric motors out back, the car can also provide torque vectoring, and traction control management reacts as quick as the onboard computers can calculate, no throttle to snap closed.
In the normal modes you’d use on the street, the GT 63 is just really, really fast. Braking is excellent, with ceramic brakes up front and steel units out back shrugging off the considerable weight. The car defaults to rapid and unflappably competent. Unlock Race mode with the right-hand steering-wheel dial, and a trio of dials on the centre console open up for fine-tuning the experience.
The first of these adjusts the responsiveness from the powertrain to accelerator inputs, and can be fiddled around with in any of the driving modes. The other two are traction control and agility control, and are only unlocked when you fully turn off electronic stability. Traction control is pretty straightforward, with the dial allowing fully nine stages of interference. Interestingly, the more interventionist range of the dial is set up to simulate how a locking rear differential might feel.
Agility control is a more complicated system,
Agility control is a more complicated system, and it effectively functions like a variable wheelbase adjustment. You’d think maximum agility would be desirable on a track, but as the GT 63 starts getting more tail-happy as the dial clicks up, it’s actually sometimes easier to pick a middle setting and concentrate on finding the right line through a corner.
Between all three settings, there’s an incredible amount of adjustability, something for a driver to winnow down to a sweet spot depending on track layout and conditions. You’d need repeated laps to sort things out, which brings us to the GT 4-Doors charging abilities, those unlocked by its clever thermal management.
Thanks to the ability to shed internal battery heat while charging, the GT’s battery back can absorb as much as 600 kWh of charging at a time. In practice, the observed charge rate actually went higher than 630 kWh, and you could watch the range ticking up rapidly. Public infrastructure to support this rapidity of charge doesn’t really exist yet, but a track-side fast-charger would make EV lapping days as straightforward as combustion-powered ones.
That’s for the track, but as a road-going
That’s for the track, but as a road-going machine, the GT 55 probably makes more sense than the 63. It’s already as fast as you could possibly want, with the GT 63 not really showing its additional power outside of a racetrack or unrestricted autobahn setting.
As a big sedan, both GTs are relatively practical, offering up decent seating for four, or five with a less sporting rear-seat configuration. The suspension is taut but not uncomfortable, fine for long highway cruising.
The technology suite is typical of modern Mercedes, big screens with plenty of information on them. The 10.2-inch instrument cluster and 14.0-inch centre screen flow together into one large surface. You’d want to spend some serious time getting to grips with this interface, familiarizing the steps for everyday tasks.
Mercedes has yet to put a number
Mercedes has yet to put a number on what the GT63 and GT55 will cost in the Canadian market, but this much battery pack and this much technology are going to carry a punchy price tag. The looks of the car were received as polarizing – it’s less striking in white or matte black – and AMG customers want that combustion-powered rumble. It’s why the G63 version of the G-Class is in such high demand.
However, as a fully AMG-engineered product, both the GT 55 and GT 63 deliver on their promise. Neither is entirely transparent in terms of how all this weight of technology is being used to generate pace, but the speed is undeniable. Both offer some of the brutality of past AMG heroes in a package that’s been polished with on-track experience and harnessed by computing. Really, the only disappointment is the anodyne naming convention: “AMG GT 4-Door Coupe.” A battery-electric descendant of the Hammer? They should have called it the AMG Mjölnir.
