Mercedes-AMG GT 4-Door
The AMG Nobody Will Call Ugly
Two of the sharpest car channels reach for sculptural and proper AMG — and walk straight past a face most people meet with a flinch.
Play the two best walkthroughs of the new electric AMG GT 4-Door and the adjectives arrive like courtiers — sculptural, sensual, proper AMG, Porsche killer. Mute the audio and a different car appears: frog-faced, star-spangled, finished in a matte canary yellow, the kind of shape most people meet with a flinch rather than a gasp. The praise and the panel never quite collide, and that gap is the whole story.
A chorus of flattery
Carwow sets the pitch before the car has turned a wheel — a "Porsche killer," a "proper AMG," the rare electric thing that "still looks very aggressive." Autogefuhl, across a walkthrough running nearly half an hour, lingers over a profile he calls, out loud and unhedged, the most sculptural surface on the car. Two cameras, two countries, one verdict: gorgeous. Listen long enough and the consensus starts to sound less like observation than etiquette.
Where the praise cracks
The tell is that nobody can keep the compliment clean. Carwow adores the rear's LED strip, then concedes in the same breath it looks "probably a little bit too plasticky," before signing off on the car as "a bit of a mixed bag." Autogefuhl springs more leaks still — the front "does remind me a little bit of frog," the face carries two clashing light signatures he would have "limited to one," the handles are fake, the console buttons "do nothing." Even his co-presenter breaks ranks, liking the front he dislikes. A design that worked would not need this much hedging.
Stars, stamped everywhere
Strip the flattery and the styling reads as one long argument with itself. The three-pointed star — once a quiet mark of arrival — is now an illuminated grille, a body pattern Autogefuhl notes is played "even more" than before, and a glowing logo pressed into the seats. The V8 is a recording, captured by sixteen microphones and piped through the cabin while the seats buzz to fake a pulse that isn't there. A QR code sits where the one-man-one-engine plaque used to be. None of it is restraint, and restraint is what the badge used to mean.
the first mainstream electric car that I'm truly excited to get in drive
very sculptural and sensual here this side profile
The reviewers, side by side
2 reviewers. 3 questions. Where the arguments overlap and where they diverge.
Nobody said the word ugly
Here is the word the panel never reaches for: ugly. Not flawed, not divisive — ugly, in the immediate, stomach-level way a stranger scrolling past a photo decides in half a second. The frog-faced front, the plasticky rear Carwow himself flinched at, the canary paint and the star-spangled everything add up to a car the eye wants to leave. That it also abandons every instinct of restraint the marque was built on is the second charge; the first is simply that it is hard to look at.
A car this loud is usually shouting over something — and this one is shouting over the way it looks.