The company that turned a carbon-fiber Mercedes 190E Evo II into a $770,000 collector car just tipped its hand on what comes next. HWA AG posted a single teaser image to Instagram showing the unmistakable silhouette of a W124-based Mercedes, and anyone who knows their AMG history can fill in the rest. It’s the Hammer.
HWA, based in AMG’s own hometown of Affalterbach, Germany, has been quietly building a business model that mirrors what Singer did with the Porsche 911. Take a beloved classic, strip it to its essence, then rebuild it with modern engineering and materials while keeping the original spirit intact. The 190E Evo II was the proof of concept, the track-only Evo R followed earlier this year, and now HWA is stepping up to a bigger, more famous canvas.
The original AMG Hammer was a sleeper in the truest sense. Built in the late 1980s on the W124 sedan platform, it packed a 5.5-liter V-8 borrowed from the S-Class and hot-rodded to 355 horsepower and 388 pound-feet of torque. Car and Driver clocked it at 5.0 seconds to 60 mph with a 178-mph top speed, numbers that embarrassed a Porsche 911 Turbo and a Lamborghini Countach on the same spec sheet.
It was a four-door family sedan that could humiliate supercars, and that contradiction made it a legend.
HWA’s Instagram caption offered the predictable blend of reverence and vagueness: “Following the HWA EVO, we are revisiting another extraordinary chapter of our engineering heritage. Staying true to its origins while exploring the possibilities of modern technology, a familiar idea is taking on an entirely new form.”
Translation: carbon fiber body panels, stretched dimensions, a reinforced chassis, and modern suspension. The same playbook HWA used on the Evo II, which isn’t a restomod in the traditional sense but closer to a clean-sheet car wearing a familiar face. No word yet on the powertrain, though the original’s V-8 lineage leaves plenty of room for speculation.
A twin-turbo arrangement pushing well past 500 horsepower would be the obvious move, but HWA has said nothing specific.
Pricing is the real question, and also not much of a mystery. The Evo II reportedly starts around $770,000. The Hammer, built on a larger platform with more complexity and arguably greater name recognition, will almost certainly cost more. Seven figures would surprise nobody.
The market for these ultra-premium reimagined classics has been quietly maturing. Singer proved there was demand at the top end. Gunther Werks followed, and Kimera and Emilia Auto did the same with Alfa Romeos.
HWA’s advantage is its deep institutional connection to Mercedes and AMG. This isn’t some outside shop trading on nostalgia. HWA’s roots in Mercedes motorsport go back decades, and that pedigree gives the cars a legitimacy that most competitors can’t touch.
Whether the collector market can sustain another entrant at this price level is a fair question. Demand for six- and seven-figure restomods has softened in some corners as interest rates and economic uncertainty have cooled speculative buying. HWA is betting that the Hammer name, combined with its own engineering credibility, will cut through that noise.
More details are promised down the road. For now, a single shadow profile is doing the talking, and for a certain generation of enthusiasts who grew up reading about that absurd sedan outrunning Italian exotics, it’s saying plenty.
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