Mercedes' CEO is personally guaranteeing you will love the next AMG GT Black Series
Mercedes-AMG's CEO is staking his own reputation on the next GT Black Series.
Ola Källenius has given what he calls his personal guarantee that the next AMG GT Black Series will deliver insane performance, speaking to Autocar ahead of the car's expected 2027 reveal and 2028 on-sale date. The road-legal twin of the next-generation AMG GT3 racer will be built around a highly tuned version of AMG's new flat-plane-crank V8, and Källenius says it will exceed the 450kW (roughly 612PS) and 850Nm of the current GT 63 Pro by a significant margin.
A promise with his name on it
Källenius did not hedge when Autocar pressed him for details. “The next AMG Black Series will be insane, and it will be something completely different that nobody expects,” he said, adding that he could guarantee enthusiasts would love it. That is an unusually direct claim from a CEO, and one that puts real pressure on AMG's engineers to deliver something that actually lives up to it.
The V8 is coming back on purpose
The Black Series marks a deliberate reversal for AMG. The outgoing GT range shifted toward a smaller turbocharged four-cylinder plug-in hybrid setup, a change that never fully won over the brand's core enthusiast base. Källenius framed the new flat-plane-crank V8 as central to AMG's investment strategy going forward, saying combustion power will remain necessary “for years to come, especially for sports cars.” He also revealed he personally owns a V8 SL, which he said gives him a direct appreciation for why enthusiasts still want that engine layout.
Hybrids are not going away, just becoming optional
Mercedes is not abandoning electrification across the AMG range. Källenius said the company will keep developing plug-in hybrid systems, which can be tuned for either efficiency or extra power depending on the model. But he acknowledged a real appetite among customers who prefer the lower weight of a non-hybrid car, and the Black Series appears built specifically for that audience rather than as a compromise between the two camps.
Built on a racer, badged for the extreme
Mercedes reserves the Black Series name for its most hardcore road cars, a badge it first used in 2006 on the SLK 55 AMG. Positioning the new car as a road-legal version of the next-generation AMG GT3 racer puts it in direct competition with Toyota's track-honed GR GT supercar, and signals that AMG wants this car judged against genuine track-focused rivals rather than other grand tourers.
The AMG One comparison raises the stakes
Källenius linked the ambition behind the new Black Series to the AMG One, the hypercar that put a detuned version of Mercedes's 2015 title-winning Formula 1 hybrid powertrain onto the road. He joked that the team behind that project “should have been put in an asylum” for approving it, but called the finished car one of the defining enthusiast milestones of the era. Invoking that project sets an extremely high bar for what the Black Series is meant to achieve.
AutoNext Take
A CEO handing out a personal guarantee is either supreme confidence or a very public way of putting his own engineers on notice. Either reading works here, and either way, AMG has now made its own life harder by saying this out loud.
The more interesting signal is the V8's return. Mercedes did not walk this back quietly, it framed a flat-plane-crank combustion engine as core investment strategy at the exact moment most of the industry keeps promising electrification is the only serious future. That is a bet on a specific kind of customer, one who has been telling manufacturers for years what they actually want, and Källenius appears to be listening.
Anchoring the story to the AMG One is a smart move rhetorically, and a risky one practically. The One earned its reputation by doing something genuinely unprecedented with Formula 1 technology. Simply promising insane numbers does not automatically earn the same kind of respect, the Black Series will have to actually deliver a driving experience that justifies the comparison, not just borrow its halo.
None of this changes what Mercedes is doing elsewhere in the range, where the case for a V8 C63 keeps getting careful, non-committal answers. The Black Series is the one place AMG has chosen to be loud about it instead, and that contrast alone tells you which car the brand actually wants people talking about.
