Carmakers have been making big cars go silly fast for yonks. Land Rover has been shoving brawny V8s into the Range Rover since 1970, while the Porsche Cayenne Turbo arguably made the concept of a performance SUV cool in Europe. Everybody’s at it nowadays, to the point where Ferrari and (to a lesser extent) BMW have created standalone, mega-power mammoths for anyone after a supercar experience on stilts. Now, Mercedes-AMG has announced that it is entering the market with a new ‘High-Performance SUV’ officially in the works.
Details of the project are thin on the ground and the only picture we’ve got to go off is the red silhouette you see here. If that’s anything to go by, the as-yet-unnamed model will have a low, sloping roofline with high-rear haunches and, er, that’s about it. What we do know, however, is that it’ll be built from the ground up as a performance car, and underpinned by the company’s new AMG.EA platform. This will be the second version of it after the impending electric four-door GT, and will therefore be offered exclusively as an EV. No word on performance or range just yet, but expect a decent step over the current 677hp EQE SUV 53 Dynamic Plus range-topper.
Of course, AMG knows how to cobble a quick SUV together. It started with the ML55 back in 2000 and has gone on to chuck big V8s (and the odd V12) into most high-riding Mercs ever since. The new vehicle, however, will be Affalterbach’s first ground-up performance SUV and only the sixth vehicle it has led development on, joining the new SL, both generations of GT, SLS and the upcoming four-door EV.
Mercedes chairman, Michael Schiebe , said: “SUVs have been among our most popular models for many years. With the ‘Born in Affalterbach’ SUV, we are responding to this trend by offering our customers a truly captivating high-performance off-roader based on the AMG.EA platform. Our new high-performance architecture follows a clear philosophy: ‘AMG First, EV Second’. This means that the vehicles not only excel as electric vehicles but also embody the core AMG qualities of emotion and performance.” So, will it swim like a Purosangue, or sink like an XM? Either way, Mercedes is going to find out soon enough.
