AMG is no after-market chop shop. Adhish Alawani slides under the shutters to see how it’s done
AMG was taken over by Mercedes-Benz to form Mercedes AMG GmBH in 1999. Until then, AMG was a tuning firm trying to make the already good Mercedes cars quicker and more fun to drive.
However, since Mercedes and AMG joined forces, the company has been working on making their cars more and more exciting. And, though AMG take the basic car from Mercedes-Benz and work on it, they believe in making their own engines as that is the most vital part of the car and that is what gives a car its special AMG character. Thus, AMG engines are not taken from Mercedes, but built by the company independently. Not just that, the AMG engines are hand-built and follow the one man-one engine philosophy.
Since 2004, every engine has come out bearing a badge with the signature of the engineer who built the motor. Currently there are 64 engineers working at the AMG engine production facility, each hand-building three to four engines per day.
The AMG engine manufacturing unit is located at Affalterbach, the home of AMG, on the outskirts of Stuttgart. The unit has recently been expanded to start the production of their new 5.5-litre biturbo engine as well. A full-fledged testing facility along with a running dyno is also a part of the factory.
AMG have set up a Performance Studio at the factory that takes care of every customisation order. This is not only for AMG cars, but for regular Mercedes-Benz cars too. A customer can order from customised wheels to body parts to any colour upholstery. Even the colour of the stitching thread can be chosen by the customer! 
A conversation with Mr Ola Kaellenius, CEO, Mercedes AMG, revealed that AMG cars formed two per cent of the total sales of Mercedes-Benz. The detailing of every bit at AMG is extremely painstaking and that applies to even the exhaust note of the AMG cars. Mr Kaellenius made it clear that there were sound engineers who had been working on the exhaust notes of the AMGs for years and fine-tuning them so as to make them feel more like music to the people on the road as well as the driver and passengers inside the car.
Talking of SLS AMG, we all know that this is the first car made independently by AMG. However, it was learnt that though AMG designed it from scratch, they did take help from parent company Mercedes-Benz. The latter had given AMG homework to do in the form of the Black series cars (SL63 Black and SL65 Black) before they got down to making the SLS. After the success of the Black series, it was time AMG worked on their independent project – the SLS.
CAPTION
A new engine being tested on a dyno. During the stress test, the engine is kept running for a long time at revs just 500 short of red line here. The red areas are because of the extreme heat generation
