Why I’ll Miss the Mercedes-AMG A45 S Hot Hatch

The world’s most powerful hot hatch is gone. Honestly, what are we meant to take from that?

If you missed the news, Mercedes has unveiled the AMG A45 ‘Final Edition’. Carmakers do not apply that label unless an ageing model has only a few months of production capacity remaining and they need to shift the last examples before they turn yellow-brown and soft, like an avocado abandoned in the fruit bowl.

Oddly, this does not mark the end of Mercedes hot hatches. The comparatively restrained A35 will remain on sale, largely because its modest 306bhp means its merely unhinged engine can more easily slip through the next wave of environmental testing and emissions administration.

Yet the A45 S was a cackling, teeth-bared lunatic in a straitjacket. EVs have so completely distorted our idea of what counts as a powerful ‘normal’ car - entry-level Volvos now offer more than 400bhp, for heaven’s sake - that we have overlooked quite how absurd the A45 S really was.

Mercedes-AMG A45 S: a tiny engine with huge power

Launched back in 2017, the second-generation model extracted 415bhp from a 2.0-litre turbocharged four-cylinder engine. This was a fully mass-produced unit, covered by a warranty and capable of travelling more than fifty yards between major services. It was not created by an unheard-of but ambitious start-up, nor by a race team with an unlimited budget. It came from Mercedes-flippin-Benz: traditional, buttoned-up, the Times newspaper of car manufacturers.

And the miniature powerhouse was not its sole madness, with all its popping, fizzing and scarcely restrained aggression. The cockpit displays could be set to show three separate rev counters simultaneously, for absolutely no reason. Drift Mode used ingenious clutch packs to fling the car sideways, too. I have never watched any vehicle annihilate a set of four tyres more quickly.

While filming a comparison test against the new Audi RS3, the AMG had to head home before the job was done. The transmission was committing crimes against Michelin, tearing chunks of rubber the size of Lego bricks from its tyres. It was a spectacularly deranged thing to witness.

And this was based on an A-Class: Mercedes’ entry-level model, initially conceived as a compact, aerodynamic, crash-safe box for thoughtful wearers of frameless glasses. After one rolled over while avoiding an imaginary elk, Mercedes reconsidered the concept, built a Golf rival, inserted a Saturn V rocket beneath the bonnet and fitted the interior with every ambient light from the Las Vegas Strip. The A45 was wonderfully incongruous. It made no sense at all.

Why the AMG A45 was so gloriously excessive

Whenever one appeared - once I had established that it was not the similar-looking A35 - it filled me with respect. Its owner had effectively decided: ‘no, I don’t want a used BMW M3 or C63 Estate. I don’t want a bargain Audi R8 or a hoonable Jaguar F-Type. I want to spend north of £55,000 on an estate agent’s hatchback with more power than a Ferrari 360, yanked out of an droney engine that would fit in a suitcase’.

It recalled the brief golden era of the early 2000s, when Mitsubishi and Subaru/Prodrive coaxed four hundred horsepower from rally-developed four-cylinder engines.

Naturally, the A45 S was never the world’s most rounded hot hatch. Its ride was intolerably firm, it carried a fair bit of weight, and if you dropped out of boost your family might submit a missing-person report, since you would disappear for so long.

Within fifty yards, anyone with sense could recognise that a Honda Civic Type R was a sharper and more genuine driver’s car. For effortless, all-weather point-to-point speed, an Audi S3 or VW Golf R could perform much the same role for less money.

Still, I will miss the A45. More specifically, I will miss the ‘why the heck not?’ attitude that produced it: the ‘eff around, find out’ philosophy responsible for its three separate turbo cooling systems, and for AMG rotating the engine by 180 degrees from the normal A-Class layout to give the turbo extra room and airflow.

Yes, it was overly complex and costly to operate. But TopGear.com ran one for six months, and it never became dull.

The A45 engine and the new Mercedes ‘45’

It is also a pity that this outrageous engine has had its name damaged. Its downfall was not reliability or output figures, but Mercedes installing it in the wrong vehicle. The raucous, laggy hornet’s-nest personality that defined the A45 was not suitable for the C63, with its storied V8 heritage. The resulting hybrid complexity and additional weight reduced the AMG C-Class to a pale imitation of itself, and sales have flatlined. Its lifespan was curtailed long before that of the A45…

Mercedes has now disclosed that the latest ‘45’ is a 2.3-tonne, CLA-shaped EV producing almost 680bhp. With its Drift Mode and a whole fleet of binary-code tricks, it will reproduce plenty of the A45’s loutish behaviour when challenged.

But you will always know that the soundtrack fed into the cabin is artificial. The seats vibrate because their cushions contain motors. This represents a very different engineering approach - and, although I would never have spent my own money on an A45, I will miss the previous sort. Just me?