AMG celebrates 50th birthday with GT, hot hatch... and a hypercar

Those three little letters have made numbers like 55 and 63, and the rubber-burning saloons they identify, familiar to every enthusiast on the planet. Half a century on, the tuning shop turned in-house Mercedes performance subsidiary boasts a huge range of high-performance versions of virtually every Mercedes in production. And that range is getting bigger all the time…

The big news this year will be the Mercedes-AMG hypercar whose existence was confirmed this week at the CES show in Las Vegas. The mid-engined monster, powered by an F1-derived hybrid powertrain, will be out to beat the equally F1-inspired Aston Martin Red Bull AM-RB001. It promises to be a 1,000bhp face-off every bit as spellbinding as Mercedes vs Red Bull in grand prix racing.

But that’s a way off. Before then we have the Detroit Motor Show (which opens January 9^th), where Mercedes-AMG is taking the wraps off two of its latest: a refreshed line of GT sports cars, to include a GT C version of the coupe for the first time, and a facelifted edition of its compact SUV, the GLA. 

The last time we saw a Merc-AMG GT at Goodwood was last summer at the Festival of Speed when the new R version made an impressive public entrance by blasting up the hill at full pelt. The R is a special bit of kit – read our Andrew Frankel’s verdict of it here – and a big step up on the GT S. Which was why AMG came up with a GT C to fill the gap, first as a convertible but now in coupe form, too.

The GT C gets 557bhp from its 4.0-litre biturbo V8 (that’s just 30 shy of the R) for 196mph v-max and 0-62 in 3.7 seconds in new coupe form. Like the ragtop C, the coupe gets the wide-body look, more muscular styling and active rear steering all passed down from the R version.

To mark AMG’s half century, the GT C is launching first as the Edition 50 model which gets either white or grey paintwork, black chrome highlights and special interior trim among other changes. First UK deliveries will be the summer, with prices to be announced. 

The rest of the GT line-up also gets a light makeover, with the most obvious change being the adoption across the range of the retro PanAmericana-style grille with its 15 chrome uprights. Also standard on all GTs now is the active air management louvres at the bottom of the front apron. Power is up too: the entry GT boasts 476bhp (14 more than before), and the S gets 522bhp (12bhp up).

The other newcomer at Detroit, the revised GLA is hardly changed over the car that launched the three-pointed star into the compact SUV sector in 2013. A package of mods – new bumpers, wheels, LED lights, birdseye camera and shinier trim – applies to all models. But the pick of the range, the AMG GLA45 complete with its 381bhp, gets more of a front-end restyling and a new diffuser at the rear. 20-inch wheels are now an option too.

The revised AMG GLA (along with AMG versions of the A saloon, coupe, and estate) is marking its imminent arrival with a less than catchily named Yellow Night Edition. There’s more equipment, bespoke trim… and, you guessed, a black paint job with yellow highlights. 

Oh well, as names go “Yellow Night Edition” probably beats “Red Sow” – the nickname of the famous 300SEL 6.3 touring car that AMG campaigned in Europe in 1971, and one of the many racers that laid the foundation on which much of AMG’s success is founded.

What name, or number, will they come up with for the new hypercar we wonder?