Mercedes-AMG One in its biggest ever test: the real world

You're probably expecting this bit to testify that the AMG One is an absolute animal on the road, barely controllable, the kind of thing you need to drive with the caution usually reserved for interactions with angry cats and volatile teenagers. Well, you’d be right. And wrong. At the same time.

Frankly, the fact that AMG has been able to make an F1 engine do road car things while retaining the essence of racecar is remarkable. The idea that the company has melded that engine with three electric motors and more than 1,000bhp, an 11,000rpm redline and an F1-ish single clutch paddlebox while retaining any semblance of road manners is witchcraft.

It is, truth be told, too fast to properly unleash on the public road. Second and third deliver the kind of warp that smacks your entire body back into the seats, the acceleration just shy of uncomfortable. But it’s not the linear, elastic thump of a hyper EV, but the visceral insanity of a 1.6-litre V6 trying to ream out your brain through your ears.

Give it death and you don’t notice the electric bit supporting traction, you just marvel that they got this thing through any sort of regulation at all. The grip, control and sheer pointiness is superlative.

The ride’s not bad, and even though the V6 sounds like a chainsaw mounted on the back of your head, you can still have a conversation if you stick it in manual mode and pick the highest gear possible. You’ll be using outdoor voices, but you can be heard. And yet you can pick EV mode and carve around on a surprising amount of range, although that’s not silent either – the electric motors whine and chitter like something from off brand Star Trek, constantly reminding you that this is a car that has an awful lot going on.

But we still took it to Tesco and got a meal deal, filled it up with normal petrol, parked it at Starbucks and got a coffee. And drove on real roads filled with random damp patches, leaves and other people. It coped with it all without a flicker of a problem. And that’s the thing with the AMG One. It’s not really just a car. It’s also probably not the absolute fastest thing on the road, although it certainly feels like it might be.

What it is, is insanely, wonderfully, absolutely fascinating. A rolling ode to complicated engineering, of finding a way. It’s the kind of car that makes us love cars. Part engineering masterpiece and part rolling, dynamic artwork. And for that, we must do nothing but applaud.

Photography: Harry Rudd