Mercedes-Benz has spent the last several months absorbing body blows over the design of its new electric AMG GT four-door. The press hates it. The internet hates it. Even people who generally like Mercedes hate it.
Now a sharp-eyed argument is emerging that the company’s own history contains a far better blueprint for a high-performance EV, one that Mercedes once blessed with its three-pointed star but never had the nerve to build itself.
The car is the CW311, a tube-framed mid-engine supercar created in 1978 by Eberhard Schulz, a former Porsche engineer, and the Buchmann brothers of the legendary bb-Auto tuning house. It was a spiritual successor to Mercedes’ own C111 experimental series from the late 1960s and early ’70s, those wedge-shaped rotary-powered test beds penned under Bruno Sacco’s watch. Mercedes was so impressed with the CW311 that it reportedly allowed bb-Auto to display the three-pointed star on the car, the only time in history an outside builder received that privilege.
That fact alone tells you something about how far the current regime has drifted.
The CW311 was everything old-school Mercedes claimed to value: functional, purposeful, devoid of ornament for ornament’s sake. Its periscope rearview mirror, drop-down headlight covers, and central hood vent existed to solve problems, not to project some vague notion of “sensual purity,” the design language that outgoing design chief Gordon Wagener has championed to increasingly disastrous effect.
The new AMG GT, with its angry squinting face and blacked-out rear lifted from a 1994 Trans Am, represents the endpoint of that philosophy. Strip away the offensive front and rear fascias, as commenters have suggested, and you’re left with something that looks like a Porsche Taycan. Not a Mercedes. The brand’s identity has been designed right out of the car.
Wagener himself attempted a C111 tribute not long ago. It arrived dripping with melted curves, gaudy details, and an interior that looked like a luxury handbag store detonated inside the cabin. It missed the point entirely.
The original C111 was beautiful precisely because beauty was never the goal. Function shaped the form. The result was timeless.
That same principle defined Mercedes’ greatest road cars. The W126 S-Class, produced from 1979 to 1991, had grey lower flanks to prevent stone chips, ribbed taillights visible even when filthy, and door handles shaped for both low drag and maximum leverage after a crash. No decorative flourish existed without an engineering justification.
People called these cars humorless. Mercedes didn’t care. That arrogance was backed by product so superior it created customers for life.
The CW311 carried those same genes into supercar territory. Clean, purposeful, something a middle-aged professional could park at a country club without looking absurd. It read like a Mercedes interpretation of a Porsche 928, restrained menace wrapped in rational design.
As an EV platform, the proportions work even better. The space once occupied by a massive AMG V8 could house rear passengers. A central tunnel running the car’s full length could pack batteries for ideal weight distribution. The ribbed taillight motif from 1980s Benz products says “Mercedes” more convincingly than any illuminated logo ever could.
Here is the uncomfortable irony buried in all of this: when automotive writer The Bishop set out to Photoshop a modern CW311 tribute, the car he used as an underlay for its crisp surfacing and understated detailing was a Lamborghini. When Lamborghini is producing more restrained, rational designs than Mercedes-Benz, the Stuttgart brand has a problem that goes well beyond one ugly four-door.
Mercedes once allowed an outside shop to wear its badge because the product earned it. Today, the company’s own design studio is producing cars that make people wonder if the badge means anything at all.
The G-Wagen, a modernized 1979 design, remains the only current Mercedes that feels authentically Mercedes. That is not a compliment to the rest of the lineup. It is an indictment.
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