What is it?
The Mercedes-AMG GT 4-Door Coupé is Mercedes’ in-house performance arm 'pulling a fast one' in more ways than one. It is a five-metre, four-seater, four-door performance GT not unlike the Audi RS7 Sportback or Porsche Panamera – and as such, being a proper Affalterbach-only production rather than another tuned Mercedes-Benz CLS, a big deal for AMG.
But the Panamera, for example, has always had its own fully distinct model identity: even though it looks a bit like a supersized Porsche 911, it wasn’t called a 911 GT. And even though it likes to think that every new car it launches these days can be made to look a bit like its ’80s four-wheel-drive icon, Audi won’t rechristen the next RS7 the 'Quattro Touring'. BMW won’t hint that its next M8 Gran Coupé is a proper sports car underneath. They just wouldn’t have the brass neck.
So is Mercedes-AMG setting us all up for disappointment by deliberately picking an identity for the new ‘GT’ 4-Door Coupé that suggests there is a meaningful technical similarity between this and the other ‘Mercedes-AMG GT’ it currently makes: you know, the two-seater spaceframed sports car?
In one or two ways, perhaps. But overall, however unlikely this may seem, I reckon AMG just about gets away with it; that the GT 4-Door is worthy of it. It may not look like a sports car, either on the spec sheet or in the metal, but it has handling smarts that very few cars of its size and weight can match.
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What is it?
About as close to invoking intellectual property rights by Porsche as Mercedes has managed so far. That rear end is way too close to the Panamera's...
I think it looks quite nice,
I think it looks quite nice, but it is intensely expensive.
I detest these tablet-style fake instrument binacles and wouldn't buy a car with one. It is as silly as Rolex suddenly decideding that digital is the way forward after all.
And I loathe the 'tailor the car's handling precisely as you like it' thing. I am not a chassis engineer. What can I possibly bring to the party that someone with skills in the art honed over a lifetime - someone like Matt Becker - can't do far far better?
I just did a side-by-side of
I just did a side-by-side of the view from the driver's seat in this car and in the A series. For your extra £100,000+ you get an extra turbine thing, a fast-becoming-a-cliché little ring on the steering wheel at 12 o'clock and, er...