According to motortrend, AMG is considering the creation of a performance vehicle based on the MFA platform (this will serve as a base for the A-Klasse, B-Klasse and other 3 small Mercedes cars by 2012). To do this, the tuner would have to modify the platform, in order to make it rear-wheel drive, as Volker Mornhinweg, Head of AMG, said that a front-drive performance car is incompatible with the company’s core values.
Considering the new car’s size, a raging V8, like the ones powering AMG’s current line-up, is certainly not going to make it to the new hot baby Merc. Instead, a 4 cylinder powerplant could enter the tuning company’s magic laboratory and become worthy of wearing the three letter badge, as Mornhinweg told motortrend. This would send the torque to the aforementioned rear wheels via a dual-clutch manual or a seven-speed Speedshift automatic gearbox. How about a proper manual people?
This would be a special example of downsizing, where a performance company decides to enter a whole new, lower, segment of the market. However, AMG seems to have taken the downsizing term literally, with the use of a 4-pot engine - for example, BMW’s M performance division is said to be preparing a performance version for the 1 series coupe, but the powerplant expected for the car is 3.0 liter twin-turbo straight six.
More variety in the performance vehicles market is what we want to hear, although we’re pretty sure that there is an elitist group of people who wouldn’t be very fond of AMG’s “popularization”: The Pagani owners - AMG is suppling engines for the Pagani Zonda and future Pagani C9. And when you pay 900,000 euro + taxes (expected price for the C9) for a hypercar, you wouldn’t even want to share the same wiper fluid manufacturer with other people, let alone the engine maker.
Google News