Why we’ll miss the Mercedes-AMG A45

Hot hatchbacks spoil us right now. You may choose from three, four, five or six cylinders, front, rear or all-wheel drive. Manual, auto or dual-clutch. Various configurations of doors, seats, boot sizes. Perhaps a drift mode or some launch control, if you fancy. 

And at the senior end of the hot hatch pecking order, you find cars democratising power that has no right living in a hatchback. Truly supercar-humbling performance has arrived in your Asda car park. When The Great Big Book of Hot Hatch History is finally written, it may well be Mercedes-AMG’s first contribution that started the ball rolling. Is the soon-to-die A45 Mk1 the world’s first true hyper-hatch?

Several Mitsubishi Evos and Subaru Imprezas with turbos the size of beach balls and service intervals more frequent than a DFS sale had brought 350bhp+ into a sort-of normal family car before. But the A45 was something different and truly absurd when it first launched back in 2013. A Mercedes-Benz containing the single most powerful four-cylinder engine in the world at that time. Displacing a mere two litres, the 1.8bar turbo-boosted unit developed 355bhp and 327lb ft. It’d be years before the Ford Focus RS got anywhere near that. BMW’s straight-six M135i was blown out of the water.

We’d expect nothing less from AMG’s first crack at a hot hatchback. AMG thrives on outrageous engines, cackling and crackling from under their hand-signed builder’s plaques. It would never have done for AMG to simply have another 2.0-litre turbo with about as much horse as a Golf R. To put AMG on the map in an all-new segment, it had to bring the muscle car noise from its halcyon V8s and distill it into a four-pot. They may have overdone it.

Though the original A45’s motor was impressively tractable for its sheer power density – Scooby and Evo tuners from the early 2000s would’ve wept for this level of on-demand urge – the A45 still took some winding up. Nothing much happened below 3,000rpm, and when the single turbo did wake up and start hauling, the buzzy, parping note hardened as the revs ripped around to a 7,000rpm cutout that actually felt a little pessimistic. It loved to rev. 

The engine – like all classic AMGs – dominated the A45 experience. It’s a ball of tightly-wound energy, barely contained in the A-Class’s pocket-sized footprint, and so full of anger. Ironically, it actually brings to mind a Japanese greatest hits album – part Evo, part Type R, garnished with Skyline pace.

Now, if you’re scoffing at my rose-tinted spectacles and thinking I’ve forgotten that the A45 was, erm, flawed, worry not. Merc’s hyper hatch was far from perfect out of the box. 

The ride was punishing, the noise droned, and the seven-speed dual-clutch gearbox was at a loss to keep up with the engine’s lust for life (which also lead to a monumental appetite for fuel) Especially once the AWD Golf R Mk7 arrived, there was no avoiding the fact the A45 felt slightly flat-footed in comparison. More like a front-drive car with unimpeachable traction than a chassis being pinged out of corners by its rear wheels.

AMG was learning on the fly, so when it came time to facelift the A45, it barely bothered messing around with the car’s ultra-subtle ‘is-that-a-diesel-whoops-it’s-disappeared’ styling. Instead, it massively re-engineered the car.

The gearbox’s software was refreshed for faster shifts, and gears 4, 5, 6, and 7 were all shortened, so the car could carry on chomping the horizon after its initial getaway phase. AMG also added dual-mode dampers as a (popular) option. Comfort mode was about where a Golf R had Sport mode, if you catch my drift, and Sport mode in the AMG was right up there with the Civic Type Rs and RS Meganes of this world for being firmer than a drill sergeant’s mattress.

More choice arrived for your ears too, via a sports exhaust with flaps you could close at the prod of a button. Quiet for leaving your driveway on a 5am airport run, fireworks for the empty B-roads ten minutes later. AMG even introduced a limited-slip diff, so the car would deploy its power more cleanly in a turn. And just to be sure that’d worked, it added more power. Obviously. 

This was 2015. By that time, Audi had launched a new RS3 with 367bhp and the A45 was no longer king of the German powerhaus hatches. Noses suitably out of joint, new valvetrain components and timing plus adjusted turbo settings amped up the A45 to a dizzying 376bhp and 350lb ft. Yes, this dumpy hatch had more grunt than the F355, the loveliest sports car ever made by Ferrari.

As a result, Mercedes claimed its chief A-Class could scorch from 0-62mph in 4.2 seconds – almost half a second quicker than before. Never has a 155mph top speed limiter been in more danger in a shopping car.

Pace was a given, but what the tweaked A45 now had was bandwidth. It hadn’t gone soft, but by twiddling the Drive Select knob and toggling your settings, you could alter the A45’s furious-to-incandescent character more finely. No longer was this just ‘An Engine Car’.

It had tenacious turn-in, cocked its inside rearwheels in tight switchbacks, and with a swift lift mid-corner, at last the chassis felt less locked-down. The genius of the later A45 was despite its certifiably bonkers engine, it had deeper layers of character and ability to enjoy elsewhere. Smarter gearbox, too.

You can tell the engineers had a laugh creating the A45. I think you can also detect that the team behind it enjoyed having a different set of rivals to contend with. Usually, AMG will be blinkered by what Audi RS, BMW M and Porsche is up to. For the A45, they had to consider Fords, Renaults and Seats. And, if the result was to justify a price well over £40k (and north of fifty grand with the juicier options ticked), be more frenetic than the lot of them.

Over the years, Top Gear’s pitched the A45 into battle against its VW and Audi nemeses, and gawped in wonder as the RS3 has seen and raised AMG’s hand all over again. A new, roomier A-Class, complete with a quite exquisite, mini-S-Class cabin is now imminent, and there’ll be two AMG versions to investigate. First, late in 2018, AMG boss Tobias Moers has promised a circa-300bhp A35 model, to keep the R, Audi S3, Honda Civic Type R and Renaultsport Megane looking lively.

Next year, we’re expecting the results of a project codenamed ‘Predator’. That’ll be the new A45, complete with a four-cylinder engine developing over 400bhp, the AMG GT-R’s Panamericana grille, ultra-low ride height and designs on a new hot hatch lap record at the Nürburgring. Lawd knows how Audi, Ford and the rest will respond, but the hyper-hatch segment isn’t going off the boil any time soon, so the first A45 has an awful lot to answer for. Farewell old friend.