RIP, Mercedes-AMG A45: how will history judge the maddest hot hatch ever made?

And so the most powerful hot hatch in the world is dead. Phew. What did we learn from all that?

In case you missed it, Mercedes has announced the AMG A45 ‘Final Edition’. That’s not something you do unless you’ve got a few months of factory capacity left to build an old car, and you need to get them moving so they don’t turn yellowy-brown and mushy like a forgotten avocado.

Weirdly, it’s not the end of the Benz hot hatch era. The less mental A35 will stick around, because with a mere 306bhp its merely loopy engine is easier to sneak through the next round of eco tests and emissions paperwork.

But the A45 S was a full strait-jacketed, giggling, teeth-baring maniac. Because EVs have totally warped our sense of what a powerful ‘normal’ car is – there are base-level Volvos with over 400bhp for crying out loud – we’ve forgotten just how silly the A45 S was.

The second-gen car, launched way back in 2017, delivered 415bhp from a 2.0-litre turbocharged four-cylinder engine. An engine in full-scale mass production that was warrantied, and went more than fifty yards between major services. Not by some ambitious start-up you’d never heard of, or a bottomless-budget race team. By Mercedes-flippin-Benz. Traditional. Uptight. The Times newspaper of carmakers.

It wasn’t just the tiny mighty motor with its crackling, fizzing, barely-contained fury. You could configure the cockpit screens to show three different rev counters at once for literally no reason. It had a Drift Mode which used clever clutch packs to hurl the car sideways. I have never seen any car, ever, destroy four tyres faster.

We once shot a twin-test with the new Audi RS3 and the AMG literally had to go home early, because chunks of rubber the size of Lego bricks were being chewed off its wheels as the drivetrain committed crimes against Michelin. It was a mad sight to behold.

And it was an A-Class! The starter-Benz originally designed as a space-efficient, aerodynamic, crash-safe box for considered, frameless spectacle types. Then one flipped over swerving around an invisible elk, Mercedes had a rethink, created a me-too Golf, shoved a Saturn V rocket under its bonnet and all the ambient lighting from the Vegas strip inside. The A45 was so incongruous. It didn’t make sense.

Every time I saw one – having carefully checked it wasn’t the lookalike A35 – I swelled with respect because here you had someone who’d thought ‘no, I don’t want a used BMW M3 or C63 Estate. I don’t want a bargain Audi R8 or a hoonable Jaguar F-Type. I want to spend north of £55,000 on an estate agent’s hatchback with more power than a Ferrari 360, yanked out of an droney engine that would fit in a suitcase’.

It was a throwback to those short-lived early-2000s glory days of Mitsubishi and Subaru/Prodrive squeezing four hundred big ones out of a rally-bred four-pot.

We shouldn’t forget the A45 S was never the most complete hot hatch in the world. It suffered from an unacceptably harsh ride, it was quite porky, and if you fell off the boost your family would file a missing person’s report because you’d be gone for so long.

Any sensible person could tell in fifty yards that a Honda Civic Type R was a much crisper, more authentic driving machine. If you wanted all-weather, zero-effort teleportation, an Audi S3 or VW Golf R did much of the same job for less cash.

But I’ll miss the A45. I’ll miss the ‘why the heck not?’ thinking behind it. The sort of ‘eff around, find out’ mantra that meant it had three different turbo cooling systems, and AMG span the engine 180 degrees versus a normal A-Class orientation to give the turbo more space and air.

Yes, it was too complicated and expensive to run. But we lived with one on TopGear.com for six months, it never got boring.

And it’s a shame this wild engine has now had its reputation trashed. Not for reliability, not for numbers, but because Mercedes put it in the wrong car. The riotous, laggy, hornet’s nest character so intrinsic to the A45 wasn’t the right fit for the C63 and its legendary V8 lineage, and the hybrid complication and weight gain that resulted left the AMG C-Class a shadow of itself, with flatlining sales. Its life span was cut short way before the A45’s…

Mercedes has revealed the newest ‘45’ is a CLA-shaped 2.3-tonne EV with almost 680bhp. It’ll lash out many of the same yobbish behaviours the A45 did when provoked thanks to Drift Mode and an armada of binary code bells and whistles.

But all the time, you’ll know the soundtrack piped inside is fake. The seats are vibrating because they have motorised cushions. It’s a very different sort of engineering – and even though I’d have never bought an A45 with my own money, I’ll miss the old kind. Just me?