{"id":2066573,"date":"2026-07-29T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2066573"},"modified":"2026-07-29T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T21:00:00","slug":"rip-mercedes-amg-a45-how-will-history-judge-the-maddest-hot-hatch-ever-made","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2066573","title":{"rendered":"RIP, Mercedes-AMG A45: how will history judge the maddest hot hatch ever made?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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And so the most powerful hot hatch in the world is dead. Phew. What did we learn from all that?<\/p>\n

In case you missed it, Mercedes has announced the AMG A45<\/a> \u2018Final Edition\u2019. That\u2019s not something you do unless you\u2019ve got a few months of factory capacity left to build an old car, and you need to get them moving so they don\u2019t turn yellowy-brown and mushy like a forgotten avocado.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Weirdly, it\u2019s not the end of the Benz hot hatch era. The less mental A35 will stick around, because with a mere 306bhp its merely loopy engine is easier to sneak through the next round of eco tests and emissions paperwork.<\/p>\n

But the A45 S was a full strait-jacketed, giggling, teeth-baring maniac. Because EVs have totally warped our sense of what a powerful \u2018normal\u2019 car is \u2013 there are base-level Volvos with over 400bhp for crying out loud \u2013 we\u2019ve forgotten just how silly the A45 S was.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The second-gen car, launched way back in 2017, delivered 415bhp from a 2.0-litre turbocharged four-cylinder engine. An engine in full-scale mass production that was warrantied, and went more than fifty yards between major services. Not by some ambitious start-up you\u2019d never heard of, or a bottomless-budget race team. By Mercedes-flippin-Benz. Traditional. Uptight. The Times<\/em> newspaper of carmakers.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t just the tiny mighty motor with its crackling, fizzing, barely-contained fury. You could configure the cockpit screens to show three different rev counters at once for literally no reason. It had a Drift Mode which used clever clutch packs to hurl the car sideways. I have never seen any car, ever, destroy four tyres faster.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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We once shot a twin-test with the new Audi RS3<\/a> and the AMG literally had to go home early, because chunks of rubber the size of Lego bricks were being chewed off its wheels as the drivetrain committed crimes against Michelin. It was a mad sight to behold.<\/p>\n

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\"A45\"<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

And it was an A-Class! The starter-Benz originally designed as a space-efficient, aerodynamic, crash-safe box for considered, frameless spectacle types. Then one flipped over swerving around an invisible elk, Mercedes had a rethink, created a me-too Golf, shoved a Saturn V rocket under its bonnet and all the ambient lighting from the Vegas strip inside. The A45 was so incongruous. It didn\u2019t make sense.<\/p>\n

Every time I saw one \u2013 having carefully checked it wasn\u2019t the lookalike A35 \u2013 I swelled with respect because here you had someone who\u2019d thought \u2018no, I don\u2019t want a used BMW M3 or C63 Estate. I don\u2019t want a bargain Audi R8 or a hoonable Jaguar F-Type. I want to spend north of \u00a355,000 on an estate agent\u2019s hatchback with more power than a Ferrari 360, yanked out of an droney engine that would fit in a suitcase\u2019.<\/p>\n

It was a throwback to those short-lived early-2000s glory days of Mitsubishi and Subaru\/Prodrive squeezing four hundred big ones out of a rally-bred four-pot.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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We shouldn\u2019t forget the A45 S was never the most complete hot hatch in the world. It suffered from an unacceptably harsh ride, it was quite porky, and if you fell off the boost your family would file a missing person\u2019s report because you\u2019d be gone for so long.<\/p>\n

Any sensible person could tell in fifty yards that a Honda Civic Type R was a much crisper, more authentic driving machine. If you wanted all-weather, zero-effort teleportation, an Audi S3 or VW Golf R did much of the same job for less cash.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019ll miss the A45. I\u2019ll miss the \u2018why the heck not?\u2019 thinking behind it. The sort of \u2018eff around, find out\u2019 mantra that meant it had three different turbo cooling systems, and AMG span the engine 180 degrees versus a normal A-Class orientation to give the turbo more space and air.<\/p>\n

Yes, it was too complicated and expensive to run. But we lived with one on TopGear.com for six months<\/a>, it never got boring.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s a shame this wild engine has now had its reputation trashed. Not for reliability, not for numbers, but because Mercedes put it in the wrong car. The riotous, laggy, hornet\u2019s nest character so intrinsic to the A45 wasn\u2019t the right fit for the C63<\/a> and its legendary V8 lineage, and the hybrid complication and weight gain that resulted left the AMG C-Class a shadow of itself, with flatlining sales. Its life span was cut short way before the A45\u2019s\u2026<\/p>\n

Mercedes has revealed the newest \u201845\u2019 is a CLA-shaped 2.3-tonne EV with almost 680bhp<\/a>. It\u2019ll lash out many of the same yobbish behaviours the A45 did when provoked thanks to Drift Mode and an armada of binary code bells and whistles.<\/p>\n

But all the time, you\u2019ll know the soundtrack piped inside is fake. The seats are vibrating because they have motorised cushions. It\u2019s a very different sort of engineering \u2013 and even though I\u2019d have never bought an A45 with my own money, I\u2019ll miss the old kind. Just me?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And so the most powerful hot hatch in the world is dead. Phew. What did we learn from all that? In case you missed it, Mercedes has announced the AMG A45 \u2018Final Edition\u2019. That\u2019s not something you do unless you\u2019ve got a few months of factory capacity left to build an old car, and you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[226,237],"class_list":["post-2066573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crawlmanager","tag-topgear-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2066573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2066573"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2066573\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2066573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2066573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2066573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}