By Eileen Falkenberg-Hull
Copyright newsweek
The turnaround at Mercedes-AMG is well underway thanks to long days and nights of hard work by the team in Affalterbach, Germany, led by chairman of the board Michael Schiebe.”I’ve been on board since February 2023. It feels like 15 years now,” Schiebe told Newsweek, eliciting a chuckle from himself and the room during an interview at IAA Mobility, a consumer and trade show in Munich.Schiebe continued to be candid, saying, “I think the team did already start the transformation of the company before I joined and took over. They already started to hire more software engineers to build up software capabilities within the company.”Schiebe has focused the team’s attention on AMG product and brand evolution and excellence. Everything they are working on feeds into that ethos.Mercedes-Benz AG, an umbrella corporation that AMG falls under, has one of the highest research and development budgets of any automaker, spending billions each year. “You don’t just need to go with the times. You need to be ahead if you want to be a successful performance brand,” Schiebe said.Not just that, a successful brand needs to create compelling product that stems from the R&D spend. “For AMG, you need to have the best product in the competitive set… You will find the customer needs to be compelled. You need to be exciting,” he explained.That required an R&D pivot, which is only starting to truly come to fruition now, most notably in the Mercedes Concept AMG GT XX, a prototype that showcases the future of the brand’s technological capabilities from powertrain to charging performance and new technologies.Shortly after its debut this summer, the AMG team took the car to Nardò, a historic test track in Southern Italy, and drove the car 40,075 kilometers in 7 days, 13 hours, 24 minutes and 07 seconds – the equivalent of the Earth’s circumference at the equator. They drove continuously at 300 kilometers per hour, only stopping to charge during that time. Charging stops included driver swaps.”The team is very, very busy at the moment, but I would say the first results coming back to our GT XX record drive and Nardò actually show that we are on the right track, on the right path with our technology that we invest into, like the high performance electric drive unit, our direct cool battery. I’m pretty confident that we will have superior technology in the market,” Schiebe said.Successful new cars are about more than technology. Design has to be just as compelling. Schiebe and his team are evolving that language.In the coming years, “We will differentiate our design much more from the Mercedes series cars, because one of the main purchase reasons for AMG is actually exterior design. When you develop the brand and you want to be successful – we said at the end of the decade, we want to be in a ballpark of 200,000 cars a year – we actually need to look at what our customers are interested in. And most of the AMG customers, they don’t want to buy a Mercedes,” the chairman said.Not a Mercedes? They want to buy an AMG, a distinction with a difference.The proof will be in the pudding, but Schibe is confident. “We wanted to be ahead of the pack,” he said. “We want to make AMG the most successful performance brand in the market; you need to have the products in the pipeline. This is why everything is centered around the product. We started to develop a product offensive, and in the next three years, you will see the many products which will be launched by Mercedes-AMG. We have never launched so many products in the history of AMG.”Mercedes-Benz has stated that 40 new and refreshed series, Maybach and AMG models will debut by 2027. AMG products are part of that blitz.
