Mercedes Concept AMG GT XX previews a Porsche Taycan rival with a British heart
Innovative British motor tech and advanced high-performance batteries are at the heart of this 1341bhp concept and the production car it'll inspire
The latest in the long line of entrants into the precarious market for electric super saloons dominated by the Porsche Taycan will be the production version of this, the 1341bhp, 223mph Mercedes-AMG Concept GT XX. Underneath the concept garnish and various callbacks to the fantastical Vision One-Eleven Concept and the iconic C111 Concept of the 1970s, lies tangible, functional tech – incredibly advanced powertrain hardware that will make its way into the next AMG Four Door. This is what Mercedes will leverage to take on the Taycan as well as Audi’s e-tron GT, the Lotus Emeya, the forthcoming Polestar 5 and even the new Jaguar saloon. The new tech may mean this is the most durable, consistently performant car of its type to date, but will it endure the troubled market for and reignite interest in premium electric saloons with supercar-slaying performance?
First the superficial stuff – the flights of concept car fancy. We’ve pleaded with Mercedes' director of advanced design Stefan Lamm to make this striking sunset beam orange hue (the most obvious evocation of Mercedes’ one-off supercar of five decades ago) an option on the production car but there are no guarantees. Even less likely to see production reality, the dynamic lights on the sills arranged vaguely in the shape of the AMG logo that use groundbreaking luminescent paint to show things like charging progress. Likewise, the MBUX Fluid Light panel at the back. Comprising 700 LEDS, it can be used for everything from alerting pedestrians to showing you how much charge your car has. Mercedes reckons the tech is ready to go, with regulations the only barrier to its introduction. Flanking the panel are triple-barrel circular light clusters that make the rear of the Concept GT XX look like the hot thrusty end of an Imperial Star Destroyer. Whether these will make production is another question. Prototypes we got up close with at the reveal of the concept seemed to still have them.
In profile it’s a sleek, swept-back thing (dimensionally, it’s actually over 100mm lower than the current Mercedes-AMG GT) with organic flowing surfacing inspired by how muscles sit under skin. The production car won’t be quite so low with such a slim glasshouse because it needs to be a functional saloon but the concept is a strong indication of what to expect.
Except also for how tapered the snout is. The bottom-feeding mouth, dainty headlights and C111-inspired vented bonnet could be grafted onto a proper two-door supercar with zero changes. The larger light units that are destined for the production car are set to double as speakers too, able to alert pedestrians or trumpet incongruous V8 engine noises out into the world.
There’s plenty of active aero going on with lessons taken from the EQXX. Louvres behind the front bumper open in various stages to manage a compromise between system cooling and drag. Look to the wheels and we see for the first time active aero with blades that can extend and retract, powered by an actuator in the wheel hub that gets energy from the wheel’s rotation and that can store it for up to 200 blade movements.
This allows hot air to be evacuated or for the wheel to be smoothed over for minimal drag in a straight line. The result is a drag coefficient of just 0.198. Perhaps if it had the wild extendable long tail of the EQXX, that’d drop further, closer to that car’s 0.17 figure.
Open the door to the Concept GT XX and more futuristic ideation awaits, in combination with serious sporting pretence. Aggressive carbon Recaro seats feature six-point harnesses and 3D-printed padding, optimised ahead of manufacture for the individual driver.
They’re also trimmed in synthetic leather made out of recycled race tyres that’s twice as strong as and near-indistinguishable from the real thing – we noted only slight differences in texture and smell. There’s also biotech silk for the stitching and yarn in the fabric door pulls that’s made using wet-spun protein powder produced by bacteria.
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Look directly ahead and you’ll see a giant panel with two integrated screens, including a vast 14-inch infotainment panel. In front of those, an aggressive AMG One-inspired steering yoke. No, those paddles aren’t for simulated gears. Just regen.
Take a closer look at the dashboard and you’ll see a finish inspired by the crackle preparation of some cam covers – a curious addition on an EV. All the orange backlighting and ‘cabling’ (a neon sign at a night club springs to mind) through the centre console is a nod to the kind of high-voltage hardware you’ll find on an EV powertrain. Fanciful it may be, but it's this kind of design detail and interior that CTO Markus Schäfer said will give the production car the kind of market
AMG Electric Architecture (AMG. EA) – what powers Mercedes’ Taycan fighter
Underneath the fantastical, dressed-up skin beats the heart of what will be Mercedes-AMG’s most powerful car yet. In AMG EA, Mercedes-AMG has brought to bear some incredibly innovative tech to generate some spectacular numbers even beyond the slightly absurd 1341bhp headline figure of this concept. If the production car gets near some of the claims for this show car – it’s expected to have around 1000bhp in its most potent form – it’s going to be easily a match for the Taycan Turbo GT and Emeya R.
The AMG GT XX Concept and indeed, the production car it will inspire, are the first full EVs to use axial flux rather than radial flux motors. Motors of this design, developed by British firm Yasa (now a Mercedes subsidiary) have seen use in some serious machinery, from the Ferrari SF90 to the Lamborghini Revuelto. But these are hybrid applications rather than fully electric cars.
With one on the front axle and two at the back, the lighter more compact motors are three-times as power dense and two-times as torque dense as a typical radial flux equivalent. Both the single motor at the front and the two at the rear are packed into a high-performance electric drive unit, along with the oil cooling system. The rear motors each have a planetary gear set (and can be controlled independently for torque vectoring) and receive power through a single silicon carbide inverter, to the tune of between 805bhp and 939bhp. The front single motor features a differential to control power distribution across the axle.
While peak power and both axles are used in launch situations, Mercedes-AMG describes the front motor as a ‘booster motor’, that kicks in only when the otherwise predominantly rear-driven car needs extra traction or motive punch. The motors alone feature 35 world-first production processes and 65 that are new to Mercedes.
Feeding these immensely powerful motors is innovative battery tech, developed for repeatable performance – they can pump out a lot of power at great speed continuously, and then crucially, take it back in at great speed. Mercedes-AMG claims the Concept GT XX is good for charging speeds in the region of 850kW for a broad period of a session at a sufficiently powerful charger.
Mercedes High Performance Charging (HPC) has that covered, with an 850kW-capable prototype. Production HPC units will pop up across Mercedes' charging network next year, in support of the production AMG.EA model, with 1000 hoped to have been rolled out by the end of the decade. In practical terms, these charging speeds allow 253 miles of range to be added in five minutes, which is really quite close to being as fast as filling a tank of fuel…
The battery manages these recharge and discharge demands by running much cooler – at an average of 45deg C – thanks to tall slim, cylindrical cells with nickel, cobalt, manganese and aluminium chemistry in the cathode and silicon anodes, of which 3000 reside in the pack. This design is inspired by the battery packs used in the F1 cars and is easier to manage in in terms of core temperatures, enabling not just fast charging and discharging, but a long lifespan. The cells are liquid-cooled with an electrically non-conductive oil coolant. We're told the battery is equivalent to past designs in terms of weight and nominally more expensive, meaning it would be suitable for use in models without such a premium positioning.
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That 0.198Cd figure comes back into play when discussing top speed. Being as slippery as it is and as powerful as it is, the Concept GT XX is claimed to be good for over 223mph. No figures are known at the time of writing for acceleration, maximum range or battery size in kWh.
‘Blah blah blah,’ I’m sure some of you are thinking. Yes, it’s choc-a-block with plenty of innovation. But will it actually be any more thrilling or engaging than the EVs we’ve come to know and ultimately forget? The truth is, we don’t know. Mercedes-AMG are bullish about how the personality of the new powertrain being a match for the old combustion engines but being coy when asked how, at least beyond its prodigeos performance. If you take the word of Michael Schiebe, Mercedes-AMG CEO, we’ve nothing to worry about: ‘The heart of an AMG was always the motor, and that will remain so with our in-house electric architecture.’
Whether the silent, ruthless performance of the AMG GT XX Concept and the production car it will inspire get under the skin quite like V8 AMGs of old, using raw performance and lights that make fake engine noises, remains to be seen. We have a hunch that you can probably guess. Whether it will be the car to reinvigorate a segment mired by poor residual values and souring customer sentiments is quite another question altogether.
