Built by Mercedes’ unrivaled Formula one team, the Mercedes AMG Project one is as sophisticated and as staggeringly impressive as one should / would expect. Every detail from design to performance has been tweaked and specially designed to represent a future we are yet to witness.
Interesting fact; last year, millionaires and billionaires around the world deposited over $500,000 as confirmation for placing orders for the Project one even before seeing pictures of what it would look like.
And, Mercedes is building 275 cars to celebrate 50 years of its high performance arm AMG of which all have already sold out. At $2.7 Million, the first owners will get their hands on the Project one in late 2019.
Unveiled last night for the very first time at the 2017 Frankfurt Motor show, the Project one hyper car is a beauty with a heart and spirit of a beast. AMG’s F1 driver Lewis Hamilton had the distinct pleasure of driving it on to the stage and he described it as “incredible.”
Also read: The Perfect Type of Car for Kampala
The Project One is seated on a hybrid drive unit lifted directly from Mercedes-AMG’s Formula One racer. The drive unit can produce more than 1,000 horsepower on a 1.6 liter, turbocharged V6 engine, with an atmospheric red line of 11,000 RPMs. The Project One features an automated AMG-Speed shift eight-speed manual transmission.
The engine features a split turbocharger design that keeps the hot exhaust gasses that power the turbo away from the compressor, thereby leading to more power through cooler and denser air being fed into the engine.
The two sides of the turbo are connected by a shaft, which itself is equipped with a 121 horsepower electric motor capable of powering the compressor in case there isn’t enough boost coming from the exhaust gasses.
Those numbers already sound unimaginable but there is more. The engine’s crankshaft is attached to an electric motor that can virtually eliminate turbo lag while generating electricity by harnessing the engine’s kinetic energy.
Additionally, Mercedes installed two electric motors, each producing more than 161 horsepower, on the front axle of the Project One, thereby giving it a virtual all-wheel-drive system with true torque-vectoring capabilities. The Project One has one engine and four electric motors.
Mercedes AMG declined to release a 0-60 mph acceleration time. However, the company claims the Project One can reach 124 mph in less than 6 seconds and reach a top speed of more than 217 mph. With a full lithium-ion battery pack, the Project One has an all-electric range of 25 miles.
