It’s safe to say that the humble ‘hot hatch’ has come an extremely long way since the original Golf GTi of 1976, at least in terms of performance and technology. It’s a different story if we’re talking about outright driving joy, which is an area where very few have ever come close to the original VeeDub.
In fact today a more appropriate term for some of the modern creations would be ‘hyper hatch’ and right now the king of that castle is the new Mercedes-AMG A45 S. It’s an engineering milestone that a 2-litre, four-cylinder engine intended for mass consumption (thus requiring a reasonable measure of durability) could produce 310kW and 500Nm.
With a claimed 0-100km/h time of 3.9 seconds, there’s little doubt that it could give many sports cars a hiding in a drag race. But how does it fare against the quintessential sports car?
With that question in mind, Australian publication
decided it was time for a race and pitted the Mercedes-AMG A45 S against the Porsche 911 Carrera at a drag racing facility.
Sacrilegious you might scream, but the publication was very quick to throw in a disclaimer explaining that the race was purely about acceleration numbers and that the two aren’t actually comparable as cars:
“One is the most respected sports coupe in the world with over half a century of heritage behind it, and the other is a hatchback with a big turbocharger under the bonnet,” Wheels exclaimed.
Perfectly put.
So how did the two performance cars fare?
At lower speeds the Porsche was just 0.1 seconds faster, but the two cars took exactly same amount of time to get to 100km/h (3.9 seconds) and this was proven on numerous runs. It’s only beyond 140km/h that the Porsche started showing a marginal advantage over its Stuttgart counterpart, something that the testers put down to aerodynamics.
Click here
to see the full story and detailed acceleration times on the WhichCar website.