Quote:
Originally Posted by CedarZ4
Almost every manufacture who has a performance sub division, e.g. M, S, AMG, are guilty of slapping badges onto cars to improve sales and money flow. If anything, BMW might be worse as they put "M" badges everywhere on cars with "M-Performance package" or parts. If I'm not mistaken, MB only uses AMG wording on non-AMG cars on their wheels (plus the actual badge now), but not various interior trim parts.
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I think its a little weird this same sort of non-point keeps coming up.
Here's the thing - this isn't about the AMG branding. It's not really that at all, because the car was already called the "AMG C450 Sport". It already had AMG in the name.
Ok, so that's not it. What's it about then?
What this is about - and again its not really about anything else at all - is that Mercedes is now using the exact same nomenclature for all AMG products, so any difference between them, from a badging perspective, is now gone.
So if we make a list of some arbitrary AMG products:
S63
C43
CLA45
GLE43
You can't tell from the model name anymore which ones are the real deal with the hand built engine and the AMG specific chassis development, and all the other stuff that makes the car competitive with a M division proper product or Quattro RS product.
Here's a similar list of BMW products:
M3
M135i
M550d
M6
See the difference up there? Look closely, you can see it. Real M products just use a single digit. Easy to know exactly what you are being sold.
So that's the deal.
Now, is this all a big deal? Not necessarily. I certainly don't care what you call a product as long as it meets my expectations of performance and value. But that's just the thing - Mercedes can now begin to obscure things here, and mix content of what were separately tiered products without it showing up in the model name. So then, it opens the door for all manner of decontenting. Of course, in affect, this is just an acknowledgement by Mercedes that its customers really care about the badge first and the product's capabilities second. That's a shame but not exactly big news.