Ahhh… the AMG One. I will assume you’ve heard of it? The new AMG hypercar powered by an honest-to-goodness F1 engine?
I’m not the first person to ask the question, but… “What on earth were they thinking?!”
I’m also not the first person to question how the idea came about in the first place, with perennially popular visions of drunken engineers, perhaps a gang of them downing shots of Jägermeister at 3:00am when one of them suddenly screams: “You know what we should do? Wait, wait…. get this…. WE SHOULD PUT A FORMULA 1 ENGINE IN A ROAD CAR! Hold on… Don’t laugh! Just THINK ABOUT IT, DUDE. A proper F1 engine in a road car!”
I honestly can’t see the idea coming about any other way. And yet… this is Mercedes-Benz we’re talking about. One of the largest and most prestigious carmakers on earth. One of the most engineering-driven carmakers in the history of the automobile. We have to assume a slew of entirely sober management types would subsequently need to sign off on the plan, don’t we? In the cold light of a sober morning after? And we must assume those same management types would have at least asked some hard questions, like: “First of call, can we even do it?”
Turns out the answer is no.
I have never driven an AMG One, and not many others have either. Not successfully, anyway. By all accounts the “One” project is an epic disaster, and an embarrassing chapter in the otherwise proud history of an otherwise proud company. A company near and dear to my own heart, it should be said. I am, staunchly, a Mercedes-Benz fanboy. I am, staunchly, a Mercedes-Benz apologist when they occasionally put a foot wrong, as all carmakers do. But the “One?” I can’t make any apologies for the One. Mercedes-Benz can’t either, and seem at great pains to kinda sweep the whole debacle under a rug somewhere and try to forget it.
So let’s help them out a bit and forget it, except to say that the car is way too expensive, way too complex, doesn’t work correctly for more than five minutes at a time, and most importantly, probably never will. It is not a “car” at all - it is a black hole of hubris and reckless overreach, all in the name of answering a question no sober person would ever ask. Which brings me to my main point.
I was driving our 1977 w116-chassis 280SE today, and every time I do I am struck by how astonishingly composed and wonderful it is. It’s luxurious in the way I like my cars to be luxurious, robust and overbuilt in the way I like my cars to be overbuilt, and offers remarkable performance and refinement which are fully useable even on today’s roads and in today’s traffic. It was built in 1977, but the package went into production five years earlier, which means it was penned and engineered in the late 1960’s. This is a car whose engineering is now pushing six decades old, and yet feels modern and useable and sumptuously pleasing today, in 2023. I restored it, and if I wanted to restore it again tomorrow, or if I wanted to restore a different w116, I could. Without much issue.
The same is true of pretty much every car I currently own, and every car we prepare here at Autology Motors. Old Land Rovers, Lancias, Porsches, Meharis… even the Opel Manta project we’re just kicking off. When things go wrong on any of these vehicles, we simply fix them. No harm, no foul. My wife drives a new Volvo XC90 “Recharge,” which is a brilliant bit of kit, but that’s because it’s new and nothing goes wrong on it. It’s brilliance, like the beauty of youth, is fleeting. What about ten years from now? What then? What will the poor bastard who owns it ten years in the future do when his (or her) high-mileage, dog-eared XC90 Recharge needs significant work?
As I sigh along in the old 280SE, I have an inner calm than I never have in the XC90. I know whatever happens, the 280SE can be repaired. I can repair it. It doesn’t matter WHAT goes wrong. I can repair it and return it to its full glory. That’s calming. But the point of this entire rant is that the reason nothing ever goes wrong is because the car is engineered not just for fleeting pleasure, but for enduring pleasure. The beauty of the 280SE isn’t temporary. It’s forever.
We may never see motorcars like that again.
We have passed a strange tipping point with motorcars. Things are changing fast. Electrification is a big part of it, but the issues go much, much deeper. We are moving away from an “ownership model” into more of a… renting/leasing model. Every year, new cars have fewer physical switches and more haptic feedback buttons. More and more of the indicators and displays are incorporated into ever more complex and individual LCD screens and displays. And that’s big.
Remember when DIN-sized car stereo head units were the norm? Now, car audio is bespoke and integrated, which has essentially rendered aftermarket car audio a dying industry. Or when aftermarket steering wheels were a big thing? Now, steering wheels are too complex, with integrated air bags and vehicle-specific controls, which reduces an entire industry to an afterthought. The same thing is happening rapidly to every component on a motor vehicle, from the windscreen wipers to the taillamps.
So I pity Mercedes-Benz for what they have endured making the One. I pity the poor buyers of the AMG One even more. But as I drive along in my 1977 S-Class, I also pity the fate of the new, 2023 S-Class Mercedes-Benz, because in fifty years no one will be able to restore it, as I have done with mine.