Mercedes AMG Sport launched to tackle BMW’s M Performance

The Mercedes AMG Sport sub-brand is launched to take on BMW’s M Performance with uprated output and four-wheel-drive as standard.

BMW has already proved there’s a gap to fill between regular BMWs and M cars with BMW M Performance, and Mercedes is now pulling the same trick with a new ‘Mercedes AMG Sport’ range that aims to plug a gap between its normal cars and AMG offerings.

The plan by Mercedes is to increase AMG sasles significantly, and it believes there are big sales to be had from cars that offer some of the AMG fairy dust but without the extremes AMG offers.

All AMG Sport cars will come with uprated engine output, all-wheel-drive as standard (although that’s market-specific – will the UK lose out?) and special chassis components and brakes from the full fat AMG cars.

Mercedes are being a bit coy about exactly what the new AMG Sport cars will deliver, but they are confirming the first two cars will debut at the Detroit Motor Show in January 2015.

Although Mercedes hasn’t said so, we’re expecting those to be a C 450 AMG Sport and a new GLE 450 AMG Sport, both with the 3.0 litre turbo V6 tweaked to around 365bhp, a chunk more than the C 400 manages, but a way off the full fat C 63 AMG’s output.

Tobias Moers, Chairman of Mercedes-AMG, talking of the AMG sales growth, said:

We are proud of these successes, as they provide the basis for the next stage of our growth strategy, which we are now launching.

In the next three years we aim to more than double our total sales for 2013.

Whether AMG are only going to add AMG Sport lines models with petrol engines, we don’t yet know. But we’d have thought it would be a no-brainer to introduce performance diesel models with the AMG Sport bits.