Mercedes-AMG Doesn’t Want Its New EV To Feel Like An EV

The three-motor electric GT 4-Door Coupe pairs fake combustion drama with serious drifting ability.

Photo by: Mercedes-AMG

By: Andrei Nedelea

Apr 5, at 5:11am ET

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Mercedes-AMG shows how easy it is to slide its new electric GT four-door on ice and tailor its handling.
It has a new driving dynamics control system called AMG Race Engineer that allows the driver to tailor the car's behavior through three settings.
Between its tri-motor powertrain and simulated V-8 sound, this should feel pretty familiar to AMG aficionados.

Mercedes-AMG is going electric with a bespoke four-door model that will rival the Porsche Taycan. The new EV promises to deliver the typical AMG experience, including simulated V-8 engine noise and gear shifts, and to be very happy to go sideways.

With three electric motors, one for each rear wheel, the new AMG EV has exceptionally precise torque vectoring that should allow the car to maintain a lot of angle going sideways. The motors themselves are special too, with an axial-flux design that keeps them very small but exceptionally power-dense for their size.

In the AMG GT XX concept, the drive unit trio delivers a combined 1,341 hp, although these figures have not been confirmed for production. The series model will likely have more than 1,000 horsepower, which it needs to match the most powerful versions of the Porsche Taycan. It likely won’t surpass the power rating of the Xiaomi SU7 Ultra, though, which has over 1,500 horsepower.

But it will be about much more than sheer power and straight-line acceleration. The vehicle features a new driving dynamics control system called AMG Race Engineer that allows the driver to tailor the car's behavior through three settings: Response Control, Agility Control, and Traction Control.

The first one adjusts how the motors respond to the accelerator pedal, while the second “changes the agility around the vertical axis,” allowing the driver to dial in more oversteer. Traction Control has nine levels, and the setting determines how much the car allows the wheels to slip, further influencing its behavior at the limit.

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You can adjust all three using physical rotary controllers, so you can quickly change them on the fly without going through the touchscreen. Giving the driver this much control and adjustability is AMG trying to extract as much fun as possible out of the tri-motor electric powertrain to make this feel like its combustion offerings, or even better.

The tri-motor setup matters because it gives AMG much finer control than a conventional two-motor all-wheel-drive EV. Instead of simply shuffling torque between the front and rear axles, it can more precisely meter power across the rear axle, too. Combine this with the very believable V-8 engine sound and the manually shifting pretend gears, and this car promises to come very close to feeling like a combustion AMG, but with greater ability to fine-tune the driving experience.