The long-awaited Mercedes-AMG One is finally almost ready to be delivered to her fortunate clients, all 275 of them, as that’s the number of cars that will be built. But, there seems to be a catch, as several of these street-legal F1-powered hypercars have been ordered by customers in the United States, and herein lies the problem … the AMG One won’t be street-legal in the US, management in Affalterbach decided against tweaking the hybrid V6 to comply with regulations in the States, it would have a negative effect on the performance of this PHEV. Mercedes just didn’t want to do that.
But there is a loop-hole I’ve been told, you can import a car under the ‘show or display’ law, this will restrict you from driving the car more than 2,500 miles (or 4,023 km) per year, but you could then legally drive one of these amazing Mercedes-AMG One hypercar on the open road in the US, just not too much, but it isn’t as simple as it sounds, you’ll have to be private party importing the car, and you’ll have to apply for the exception, which requires the car in question to be ‘historical or technological significant’, this also applies to cars being built in limited numbers, with 500 units being the threshold it seems … and there’s more, apparently, it is a costly process, but once one is approved, other people can import the same car under this initial ruling … so let’s see who is brave enough to attempt this procedure.
The Mercedes-AMG One is powered by a Formula One-derived 1.6-Liter turbocharged V6 engine (from the 2015-2016 era it seems) that can rev up to 11,000 rpm, and with the combined power of the four additional electric motors you are looking at 1,063 hp for a car that weighs 1,695 kg, that’s a very nice power to weight ratio, not like a Koenigsegg 1:1, but still impressive nonetheless, just as a side-note, that relatively small 1.6-Liter engine on its own delivers 574 hp at 9,000 … acceleration figures come down to 2.8 seconds from 0 to 60 mph, after just 7 seconds flat you’ll be doing 200 m/h behind the flat F1-style steering wheel.
But enough with the technical info and details, let’s take a look at some videos of people actually driving the Mercedes-AMG One on the famous Nurburgring track in Germany, first up is a behind the scenes look from Top Gear as Chris Harris drives this new, multi-million hypercar from Affalterbach:
Mat Watson from CarWOW was also able to take the wheel of the Mercedes-AMG One on the same Green Hell circuit:
As a big AMG fanboy, owning multiple Mercedes-AMG cars, Tim, aka Shmee150 just couldn’t be absent from this First Drive article either:
And finally, Remove Before Race also took a stint behind the wheel of the AMG One:
