Never Stop Driving #27: Is the Mercedes Hypercar pointless?
The long-delayed Mercedes hypercar, the AMG ONE, set the record for the fastest production car around Germany’s Nürburgring racetrack: six minutes and 35 seconds. The sports car will cost nearly three million dollars and uses a derivative of a Formula 1 engine.
I find myself yawning at this achievement and I’m not sure why. I certainly appreciate the engineering effort behind the car and the audacity of the project. Back in 2017, when Mercedes announced its intentions for the car, the company boasted that AMG-ONE would be “the most extraordinary, contemporary, road-legal racing car.”
I’m also a huge fan of lap-time-based performance tests, having started two U.S.-based ones in my career. I organized the one that survives, Car and Driver’s Lightning Lap, in 2006 after Warren Mosler, the “mad scientist” behind the Consulier, suggested the U.S. needed a version of Germany’s Nürburgring test. I agreed and picked Virginia International Raceway’s (VIR) grand course because of the wide variety of turns but also for its 4.1-mile length.
The VIR record in 2006—three minutes and seven tenths of a second (3:00.7)—was set by a Ford GT. Last year, the raciest version of the Honda Civic, the Type R, set the same time. In roughly 15 years, Honda engineers figured out how to make a Civic perform like a $100,000 mid-engine sports car. Wow. Also, Honda just updated its little terror.
So, the most expensive Mercedes ever built set the record. Got it. The 275 buyers will love and covet it. The car joins a pile of seven-figure hypercars, from the Aston Martin Valkyrie to the Bugatti Chiron to the McLaren Senna to the Ferrari Daytona SP3 to the whatever is newest and next. I’d be grateful to own any of them, but the sheer number of models is starting to feel like a bit much. I’m not alone in this thinking.
By the way, I do find one of these hypercars, the Gordon Murray T.50, very intriguing. Built by the same man who was behind the McLaren F1 road car three decades ago, the T50 is billed as the last great analog sports car. It’s got a high-revving V-12 and a manual transmission and is already sold out.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, a four-mile stretch of Tennessee highway was equipped with some 300 high-definition cameras to study traffic and congestion patterns. Vanderbilt University will use the new highway and conduct a test featuring 100 vehicles equipped with driver-assist systems to see if perhaps automated cruise controls can smooth out traffic patterns.
Waymo announced that now anyone can hire a ride with one of its autonomous taxis. Previously, riders had to preregister. Waymo will also soon join Cruise by offering driverless rides in San Francisco.
If you like to wrench on cars, Rob Siegel explains how to avoid the usual nightmare of repairing cars for friends. One day, Siegel might be fixing the latest BMW M car, the M4 CSL, which Henry Catchpole reviews here. We wrote a love letter to the Tri-Five Chevy and the Barn Find Hunter Tom Cotter took us on a tour of fantastically wacky Lane Motor Museum.
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I too share a certain, yawn, absence of enthusiasm for the parade of new super-duper cars. Not because I don’t have a finely tuned respect and appreciation for the impressive advancement of engineering and technology represented, but more just plain Italian sarcasm as to the individuals who will be buying them. Upon whom they will be wasted.
It brings to mind the constant stories in the day of those who could afford to buy the new Lamborghini Miura, but who were impressively incapable of driving it. It seemed as if the A6 around Nice was littered with them.
One of my personal favorites was in one of the research books given to me by the head of communications at the Bertone factory. It told of how even those with a deft hand and some experience had to beware. Nuccio Bertone was in the habit of taking his new Miura up to the family house in the mountains and lost it. It was on the decent from Cesana early in the morning, when he came through a corner lightly paved with black ice. After a quick 360 he and the Miura continued the descent, beyond the road. Too embarrassed to have it returned to the factory for repair, he called a friend at a local petrol station, and had it towed to a private garage for repair.
Hey I own cars that are over my head! So I don’t think the new owners have to capable of using every inch of performance, at all. I say good on them, I hope they enjoy their cars. I was hoping to express how the sheer number of new hyper cars has slightly diluted, for me, the fun and wonder of them.
I miss the “Community” format, I must have missed the article where we had the election to keep or reject it.
Yes, yawn. But my reasons for not being blown away by this achievement are different. When I was a kid, looking at the car magazines, exotic cars were just that — exotic. But at the same time, enthusiast cars were available that did 80-90% of what the exotics could do, but at a price a working person could afford. Fast forward — now, you must have $20k or more in addition to the MSRP to get an enthusiast car. GR Corolla? Civic Type R? Nissan Z? Rubicon 392? Forget about it. Unless you have $20 to $50k of cash you can just put in a greedy dealer’s pocket, these vehicles are as unobtainable as a Ferrari Red Head was in 1985. The huge markups and difficulty in even getting a dealer to talk about price have crushed my car enthusiasm. Recently I asked a dealer if they could tell me how much market adjustment they were requesting. They responded by stating they suddenly had no cars for sale. Dealers may end up killing a large sector of the enthusiast crowd, which hurts all of us, and our hobby.
Well done Larry. Just remember you can’t please everyone.