AMG GT SUV: great engineering, poor software and design
Yesterday Mercedes-AMG took the covers off its first electric SUV, the GT SUV, in Stuttgart. 800V, up to 128 kWh, 700 km WLTP and up to 710 kW charging, the GT 53 can be ordered from 20 October starting at €113,050 in Germany (press release). On paper it's impressive, the software and design however are a different story. From the recorded V8 sound to the plastic vent grille they are all part of the same theme, there to make the car look and sound like the petrol AMG it replaces rather than what it actually is, a nod to the past rather than something new.
Starting with the outside, the front has an illuminated AMG grille with vertical struts, the star in the middle, star shaped running lights and more intakes, vents and slats underneath, it's a lot. The rear has six round turbine taillights and a full width light strip, a great signature, except it sits inside a black panel above a recessed plate, the bumper and a big black diffuser. That's four or five things fighting for your attention on one face of the car.
Most of it is copied almost piecemeal from the AMG GT 4-Door Coupé, revealed back in May with a design that was pretty much universally hated (autoevolution). On the long, low coupé the rear light panel almost works, it sits across a wide flat tail and reads as part of the shape, but transplanted onto the taller SUV tailgate it looks forced and out of place. The front grille on the other hand looks just as out of place on both.
Inside it's not much better, I am not a fan of the interior at all. The cabin looks claustrophobic and the digital themes on the screens are extra garish, borderline gaudy, the same busy chrome approach as the outside just in pixels this time.
There is a glaring lack of function behind all that black plastic, it sits exactly where the radiator vents and all kinds of historical intakes used to be on a petrol car, and an EV simply doesn't need most of them. Forcing plastic in there just makes it look like a petrol car that had its engine swapped out, rather than an EV designed from a clean sheet. So I tried deleting it.
I am no car designer, this redesign is just to show that Mercedes no doubt made a deliberate decision to add all the busy chrome and garish details. My prompt was simple: keep the light bar and the six round lights exactly as they are, but cut them straight into the body instead of a black panel, blend the diffuser in and make the plate flush. At the front I dropped the grille altogether, leaving just the star and the plate on a smooth nose.
Without the plastic it does not look great either. It follows the existing shape exactly so it inherits all the proportions, and without the grille the front winds up looking a bit generic EV, think Model Y. Deleting things won't fix proportions, that's a job for a design studio not a prompt. Still, the rear is cleaner, the lights read as one graphic instead of lights inside a frame inside a panel.
LUCE
Because the rear lights are inset in a black panel the AMG's rear panel reminds me of the Ferrari Luce, however comparing the two though there is a big difference, on the Luce that black panel is the central cell itself showing through the bodywork that floats around it, Ferrari's own description puts it like this:
A central cell houses the passengers, whilst the car’s mechanical and propulsive core is surrounded by bodywork elements that appear to float around it, including, notably, the two suspended front and rear wings.
So on the Luce the rear protrusion is a functional part of the car spanning the whole body, with the rear wing floating over it, as opposed to the AMG where it's decor plastered on top.
ROADSTER
Two days before the GT SUV, Tesla finally unveiled the new Roadster, developed together with SpaceX of all things (electrek).
Say what you want of the new Roadster, the design is impeccable and it has absolutely nothing externally that does not serve a clear function, nothing is decoration. Hidden headlights, one sharp nose with no fake grille or vents, flush aero and active wings that only come out in Track Mode when the car actually needs the downforce.
The rear looks just as busy as the AMG at first glance, except every one of those holes is doing something, they are the fans for the suction system and the cold gas thrusters. Above them one full length taillight, no frame and no six of anything. Whether it all makes it onto a public road is another story, but unlike the AMG nothing on it is there just for decoration.
SOFTWARE
Now more on the software failings. On the GT 63 and 55, AMGFORCE Sport+ "faithfully reproduces the sound of AMG V8 engines", recorded with 16 microphones from cars like the GT R, complete with simulated SPEEDSHIFT gear changes and seat shakers (press release). I see the simulated V8 as a distinct failing, because the car actually has something far more interesting to tell you about, those same two versions have torque vectoring between the rear wheels.
In my previous post, Can you hear torque vectoring?, I detailed how that could work. The torque vectoring controller shares its per-wheel torque commands with the audio system and the sound moves around the cabin towards the wheel being driven harder, getting louder the bigger the torque difference, so you can hear how hard the electronics are working before you run out of grip. McLaren even has a patent application for exactly that.
Or at the very least it could have used something mechanically tied to the motors like the Luce. Ferrari puts a sensor in the rear axle housing that picks up the real vibration of the gears and electric motors, filters it and amplifies it inside the cabin and outside, distributed between the front and rear axles according to the torque delivered (Ferrari). Nothing is added that isn't already there.
Which brings me to the other missed opportunity, the axial flux motors themselves. They come from YASA, the British company Mercedes bought in 2021, and they are a big deal, flat pancake shaped motors that pack a lot more power into a lot less weight than the usual radial ones.
Like any electric motor they have their own sound, a whine whose pitch follows the motor speed and changes with load, and with one at the front and two at the rear the car could feed that real sound back to the driver from where each motor actually sits. That would be a sound only this car can make, a genuinely electric AMG sound.
ONE-ELEVEN
The frustrating part is that Mercedes clearly knows better, it has done a digital black front and rear before. The Vision One-Eleven from 2023, a modern take on the 1970s C 111, has a black panel at both ends too, and it was pretty much universally liked.
The difference is that the black panel is not there to fill a gap. The front is "a flexible external display with a 3D pixelated look" that "interprets the C 111's characteristic round lights in digitised form" and can show messages to other road users (Car Body Design). One thin light outline frames it and the bodywork flows around it uninterrupted, no fake vents or slats anywhere.
The rear does the same thing with a matching display, the red outline doubles as the light bar and the two round taillights are drawn in pixels inside it, a black panel with round lights just like the GT SUV, except here it is the light itself rather than plastic around it. It even used YASA axial flux motors, so the tech under the GT SUV already had a design to match, it just never made it from the concept to the production car.
ICONIC
Its latest design study goes even further, just look at Mercedes' own Iconic Design book, featuring the Vision Iconic show car from October 2025, an Art Deco take on the 1930s that Gorden Wagener called "a sculpture in motion".
Look at the top down shot, one slim light line set into a rounded, uninterrupted tail, no black frame, no fake vents, no plastic diffuser, all the drama comes from the surfaces and the light. Where the Luce gets to a clean design through its structure and the Roadster through function, the Vision Iconic does it through pure sculpture. That is the direction my rear edit was going in and the opposite of what the production GT SUV does. The engineering is already there, if the design and software were as forward thinking as Mercedes' own studies, the GT SUV could have been genuinely iconic.
So to close, one last rendering, this time with the One-Eleven front and rear lights on the GT SUV. The pixel headlights sit in one black display framed by a single light outline, and at the back the display can show anything, even the name of the car. Unlike my plastic delete it does not look generic, and unlike the production car every black bit is actually doing something. Not bad for a design Mercedes already had three years ago.