There are very few truisms in car design. One is that mid-engined sports cars are excellent due to their weight balance. But there is another more interesting one — when you put a powerful engine in a small hatchback, you get some pretty astonishing results. This so-called ‘hot hatchback’ segment is quite popular in many parts of the world, and honestly, these cars are utterly brilliant to drive.
But for the life of me, I have never been able to figure out why such a segment is stillborn. Despite the current onslaught of the ‘SUV Body’, we still love our hatchbacks in India and vehicles like the Maruti-Suzuki Swift remain bestsellers. But we have never really had a ‘hot hatch’ in India. Sure, Hyundai sells the i20 with a 120PS turbocharged engine option, which is a fun car to drive, particularly in the N-Line guise with slightly improved aerodynamics and suspension elements. And Volkswagen used to have the Polo GT TSI. But both these cars are best described as ‘mildly warm’ hatchbacks. Hyundai never even brought the European-spec 200PS i20N to India, a car that Jeremy Clarkson said made him “fall back in love with driving”. Sure, Volkswagen India imported a 100 or so units of the Polo GTI back in 2016-2017. And the GTI typified the term ‘hot hatch’ — 195PS of power in a car that weighed just over 1200 kg, seriously hair-raising to drive. But Volkswagen doesn’t even make the Polo in India anymore.
I have driven one of the ultimate expressions of a boiling hot hatchback — the BMW M135i around mountain roads, the so-called Alpinestrasse on the Austro-German border. This overpowered car (315 horsepower) with rear-wheel drive was just utterly bonkers. And I drove a manual, which allowed me to go sideways into corners. The sort of things you can only really do on a closed private road.
But when BMW brought the 1-series to India, they didn’t bring it in this guise, and the concept of a luxury hatchback never really took off. I guess the Indian market was not only still a bit new to luxury brands in general, and if you spent that kind of money, you wanted the car to be big. Even if that meant you had a small diesel motor inside.
The fun hatchback
This brings me to the one car in India that doesn’t just define ‘hot’; it is genuinely hard to find the correct adjective to describe the Mercedes-Benz AMG A 45 S. I’ll just stick to calling this ‘fun’. Think about it, 415 horsepower and a weight of 1,680 kg. Sure, it is heavy for a hatchback, in fact, it is heavier than a Hyundai Creta. But when you look at the size of the brakes on this car, you realise that those can’t be light. After all, if you have to come to a standstill quickly from 270 km per hour, you need big, heavy brakes. And then there are also all the toys inside, I mean when you are paying a crore for a car you expect it to have mod-cons like electric seats.
Now, without incriminating myself in the following lines, I will just say that this car goes like stink. Shift the car to Sport mode, turn out the loud exhaust, and this car will move. And it will make sure that everybody knows that it is moving as the potential energy stored inside dinosaur juice is converted to motion and noise. Thankfully, Mercedes-Benz realises that this is a lot of power, so the A 45 S has all-wheel drive, or 4MOTION as Mercedes calls it. This ensures that you always have traction and don’t slide off, particularly on corners. That compensates to a degree, along with some electronic aids, for any lack of talent behind the wheel.
This is the definition of the term ‘Pocket Rocket’, proving that size really doesn’t matter even if Lionel Messi has proven that time and again. I understand at many levels this car makes no sense at all — it is a hatchback, though a large-ish one, and for the same kind of money you can buy the much larger Mercedes-Benz GLE 300d, but you won’t be having anywhere near so much fun. Little wonder then, when I was driving this car, I got more people to stare at it than any other Mercedes I’ve driven in India for quite some time. And while the company isn’t bringing all that many units of the A 45 S AMG into India, they have sold out the vehicle for the next few months. This points to a general trend of Indian consumers wanting powerful cars as Santosh Iyer, managing director, Mercedes-Benz India explains. “There has been a growing demand for our top-end vehicles, including the AMGs, and this is buoyed by customer’s soaring aspirations to own such exclusive vehicles. This aspiration is well supported by increased spending power and a growing consumption mindset, which indicates a shift in the luxury car market,” he says.
Balbir Singh Dhillon, head, Audi India, added, “With improved infrastructure and a burgeoning automotive culture, enthusiasts are increasingly drawn to the allure of powerful engines and cutting-edge technology. It’s a fusion of economic prosperity, evolving preferences, and a drive for distinction that propels this trend towards the upper echelons of the market.”
On a sombre note
Other carmakers are noticing that buyers want powerful, possibly even hot hatches. Volkswagen has spoken of bringing in the latest version of the Polo GTI and the iconic Golf GTI to India. And while Hyundai has currently withdrawn the i20N from global markets, there are chances that a reboot of that car and even the IONIQ5N, which I drove in South Korea last year, could come to the country as well.
I have to end this column on a sombre note. Such powerful cars like the A 45 S AMG are fun to drive. But when I took it out, I was stone-cold sober. Heck, I even went easy on the coffee before I drove this. As the saying goes, with a lot of power comes a lot of responsibility. It is just as true for vehicles as it is in politics. In light of what happened recently in Pune, there are a couple of things I would like to say. First, do not give your underage children the keys to any car, let alone a 500-horsepower supercar. Second, city streets are nowhere to drive fast, there are new racetracks and the BIC where you can drive very fast and push your vehicle to its limits.
@kushanmitra is an automotive journalist based in New Delhi. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)