Why The New Mercedes Benz AMG GT 4 Door Is A Hideous Repudiation Of Everything A Mercedes Is Supposed To Be
We’re going to play a little guessing game. Next time you’re out on the road and you see a newish Mercedes Benz from the last decade or so, try to guess what model it is before you’re close enough to read the badge. I can almost guarantee you’ll get it wrong. Want to know why? Because they all look the fucking same. Sure, the volumes might be different depending on whether it’s a sedan, an SUV or a coupe, but beyond that try and tell them apart. It’s impossible. E-Class? EQE? EQS? Who the fuck knows. I imagine the poor souls who have the job of selling the wretched things have difficulty explaining to baffled punters why forty grand’s worth of boggo C-Class looks similar to a hundred grands worth of EQS. Has any premium OEM flushed its storied heritage down the khazi quite so successfully? The current range are perfectly shaped for slipping round the U-bend after all.
It’s not only the exteriors that have been on the photocopier. For years Mercedes interiors have been defined by retina burning Cinemascope touchscreens, turbine air vents and ambient lighting from a Middle Eastern nightclub. Mercedes interior designers would probably put a screen in the fucking headliner if they thought they could get it through crash testing. Dullsville, Iowa on the outside, ghastly and tasteless on the inside, it’s safe to assume if the Mercedes Benz motto “The Best or Nothing” is hanging on the wall in the Sindelfingen design studio it’s in ten-foot-high neon letters.
I’m not a religious person, but I try to be sensitive to those who are so please excuse me when I say what in the Jesus H Three-Pointed Christ is going on in Stuttgart? The brand-new Mercedes-AMG GT four door coupe plopped onto the litter tray like a piping hot cat turd on Wednesday morning and crikey it’s another horrifying fish, like something from a David Attenborough documentary about mutated sea creatures dwelling at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Automotive social media, not always an arena for nuanced debate I grant you, has been universally caustic and unstinting in expressing disappointment. My reaction is much the same as it has been for every other recent Benz release over the last decade or so: my whelm is well and truly under. Oh look. Mercedes Benz have launched their car again.
How Peak Mercedes Started
It would be easy to place the blame for all this on departed design chief Gorden Wagener, which is exactly what I’m going to do. But before that we need to understand what a Mercedes was and how their existing design direction is an anathema to everything the brand traditionally stood for.
Although he gets almost all the credit for defining “peak Mercedes” from the mid-seventies to the late nineties, Bruno Sacco didn’t lay down the formal, structured forms we associate with classic Mercedes designs. The foundations were first sketched by Paul Bracq with the W113 Pagoda SL of 1963 and the W108 sedan of 1965. This pair of cars moved Mercedes away from the pontoon and streamliner influences of their post-war cars, exemplified by the seminal 300SL Gullwing.
At the time Mercedes was known for the thoroughness of their engineering, their exemplary build quality and perhaps most importantly their safety. Thanks to the genius of Mercedes engineer Béla Barényi, Mercedes pioneered the crumple zone which appeared on the W111 “Fintail,” which also provided the basis for the Pagoda. It was his thinking that gave that car its distinctive hard top, his reasoning being that the highest point of the roof should be above the passengers heads, not in the middle of the car. This commitment to safety would remain a hallmark of the brand for decades to come. Mercedes’ weren’t sporty or flashy; they were very expensive cars for old money types who didn’t buy a house full of beautiful furniture — they inherited one.
Bracq had worked under Friedrich Geiger, who was head of Mercedes design both before and after the war. The car that made him was the 1934 500K W29, a long, high-performance roadster meant to be driven by its owner when such a thing was still something of a novelty. The Pagoda and Fintail were designed on his watch, as well as the W100 600 Großer Mercedes of 1964. At the time it was the most expensive car in the world and with its hydraulic powered everything, the most complicated. It also had the dubious distinction of being the chariot of choice for despots everywhere. Geiger retired in 1975 and Bruno Sacco, a trained engineer cum-designer who had been at the company since 1958 took charge.
A Mercedes’ exemplary build quality and cost-no-object engineering meant they lasted a long time. Sacco was careful to ensure that no new model made the previous one look obsolete. What this translated to in his work was a careful cultivation of the themes laid down by Bracq, sensitively updated over successive models while incorporating the latest advancements in technology, aerodynamics and most importantly, safety.
If you want proof of how well the Mercedes family identity worked across the range, look at the 1977 T1 van, in production essentially unchanged until it was replaced by the Sprinter (a further successful update of the same ideas) in 1995. That two-decade run of Mercedes Benz vehicles is a phenomenal body of work, but more importantly it demonstrates how you can exemplify your brand values through successful, thoughtful and consistent design.
When he retired in 1999 Sacco was replaced by Peter Pfieffer, who joined Mercedes in 1968 from Ford’s Cologne studio. Fittingly for the world’s oldest car maker, like Sacco he was not a figurehead when such a thing was becoming the norm. Rock star names like J Mays and Chris Bangle were visible, media savvy designers with a lot to say. Such a thing was inappropriate for Mercedes, which very much did things in its own time-honored way, which was all well and good until the disastrous “merger of equals” with Chrysler in 1998, which took everything good about both companies and fucked it all into a cocked hat.
Dr. Z and Flash Gorden
Emerging from the rubble post-merger in 2007, Mercedes was in trouble. Its deadly rivals in Ingolstadt and Munich were stealing their lunch and attracting younger, affluent buyers – always the dream for OEMs because if you get them young you’ve hopefully got them for life. DaimlerChrysler (and then Daimler AG) Chairman Dieter Zetsche was determined to reestablish Mercedes’ reputation and meet BMW and Audi head on. This is the context for Mercedes wanting a younger, more expressive designer to shake things up. Enter “Flash” Gorden Wagener.
Wagener is working class guy who studied industrial design in his native Essen, a blue-collar town in the Ruhr Valley. He then when on to study automotive design at the Royal College of Art in London (does any of this sound like a slightly less successful car designer you know?) and joined Mercedes in 1997 at the tender age of 29. He’d done a bit of time in the trenches at GM, Mazda and VW but it was at Mercedes where Wagener would come into his own. After a couple of years Pfeiffer sent him to the Mercedes advanced studio in California, where he mastered the art of giving press interviews and getting high on his own farts.
Wagener’s influence would be felt initially in cars like the first CLS, a car I initially hated. It was a massive departure for Mercedes because it was a car that sold explicitly on expressive style. Although the CLS was a success, other deviations from the sober Mercedes norm were not. What, exactly was the point of the not-a-car-not-an-MPV R-Class? When Pfeiffer retired in 1999, he anointed Wagener to take over in the Head of Design position, aged just 39.
What is important to understand is that Mercedes, like BMW, first and foremost saw themselves as an engineering company. And like Chris Bangle at BMW, Wagener was determined to make a break with this approach which he considered lacking in emotional appeal. He developed a new from language he dubbed “sensual purity,” which first appeared on the AMG Vision Gran Turismo concept of 2013.
Looking like a cheap diecast of a much better-looking car that had been trodden on, the Vision GT had a deep bodyside, a squashed passenger cabin and enough dash-to-axle ratio to make grown men feel like THEY were driving their own dick, something that can also be said about Wagener’s self-confessed favorite of his own work, the AMG GT. The Vision GT also introduced the squinty headlights, wide gaping grille and smooth surfacing that Wagener presumably came up with after trying and failing to pick up a bar of worn soap in the shower.
Since then, it’s been a case of one size fits all – rather hilariously given this is the exact situation BMW found itself in pre-Bangle, and I don’t think any of it is entirely a coincidence. The big three premium German brands have been chasing each other’s tails for decades at this point – essentially since they all decided to extend down market into cheaper cars in the mid-nineties. If one does something the others follow, which is how we’ve ended up splitting niches with the worst-of-both-category cars like the GLC and GLE coupe SUVs. More than that chasing younger, fashion conscious and social media savvy buyers led to things like the ridiculous Virgil Abloh Maybach collaboration, a bespoke 6 meter long, two-seater SUV thing, another example of heinous post-modernism eating its own tail.
Why The AMG GT 4 Door Is Bad
Judging the AMG GT 4 Door Coupe on its own merits it’s clear Wagener’s “sensual purity” design language has run out of catwalk. The main visual pain points are the truncated tail with its full width and depth blackout panel containing triple rear lights looking totally lost in the void surrounding them, and the gaping oversized grill with its lit vertical elements. The headlights have an odd, ill-defined shape that’s neither fish nor fowl, and why isn’t there a black infill panel between the top of the rear wind shield and the black panoramic roof?
Opening the door to the interior you half expect to bit hit in the face with a cloud of shisha smoke. It’s hard to tell from the released media images exactly what’s going on with the highlight colors – one set of shots resembles Darth Vader’s childhood bedroom with red stitching, seat belts, seat inserts and red graphics on the headliner and then there’s a few images with yellow contrast stitching without showing how that color is applied anywhere else. I think it’s safe to assume any color theory around complimentary tones was flushed down the bog along with any sense of taste. As for the screens, Wagener is on record as saying:
“When you have a small screen, you automatically send the message ‘congratulations, you are sitting in a small car’.”
Truly spoken like a man who probably thinks a 100” flat screen television mounted directly to the wall in your living is the height of home interior sophistication.
It’s easy to fall into to the trap of criticizing the current Mercedes range of aero blobs for not adhering to what we consider to be the classic Mercedes brand identity – but that is exactly the problem. What Mercedes says they stand for – The Best or Nothing – is not reflected in Wagener’s direction for the brand over the last fifteen years or so. A sprawling range of identikit cars all with the same soft surfacing and oversized grilles festooned with Temu LED lighting do not speak softly to quality of engineering and longevity of service.
Instead, they glitter like tasteless baubles and snare superficial customers with the siren call of cheap leases. Wagener’s stated intention was to make Mercedes more emotionally desirable, but what this overlooks is that emotional attachment to a brand is not only about appearance – it’s about how your stated brand values translate into the overall ownership experience. BMW and to a lesser degree Audi, have one or two missteps aside, managed to maintain and evolve a consistent identity for decades. You can draw a straight line from Michelotti’s Neue Klass sports sedans to the current 3 series. Massimo Fraschella’s Audi Concept C references J Mays and Freeman Thomas’ original TT whilst refining and advancing the ideas behind that groundbreaking car. Both these brands have had no problem attracting a younger demographic and they haven’t needed tawdry brand tie-ups to do so.
Mercedes sales volumes and profits have been trending steadily downward since peaking at around 2.9 million units in 2019. Perhaps not coincidentally “Flash Gorden” was bundled out of the side door by mutual consent on the 31st of January this year. Taking over his position is former AMG head of design Bastian Baudy, another Mercedes long termer. With that in mind another Wagener style step change in direction feels unlikely.
A strong brand is a deal – customer expectations being met by a company delivering on it’s promises. That is what customers pay a premium for. When you deviate so significantly from the values that made your company in the first place, those promises begin to sound a little hollow. If you put all your efforts into making shiny things for shiny people, you shouldn’t be surprised when they ditch you for the newest shiny thing that comes along.
All Images: Mercedes Benz Media
