Big little fryer
NUMBERS MUST BE fascinating things if you’re a mathematician, and no doubt plenty of accountants find themselves richly stimulated by a really good-looking spreadsheet.
But for us car enthusiasts – driving enthusiasts
– I can’t help wondering: has the obsession with numbers gone too far? We seemed to be urged to take the latest hi-po contender’s Nürburgring lap time, divide it by the 0-200km/h figure, add the often meaningless ADR consumption number, minus the year your mum was born, and bingo, there’s your star rating out of 10 right there.
If you’re cheering in agreement, watch as I now perform a spectacular backflip with double-pike contradiction. Because no dissection of the new Mercedes-AMG A45 can begin without tossing around a few numbers. But I’ll try to be concise: this new W177 model, due in Australia in the first quarter of 2020, makes maximum power of 310kW, up 30kW on its predecessor (over 10 percent), while torque is now 500Nm, up 25Nm from 475. It does all this – still – from just 2.0 litres.
That makes its
