“Revolutionary drive system”, “Pioneering innovation.”, and “New chapter in our history.” are phrases we see all too often in the press releases we get as part of media, but it’s not always that these claims hold a lot of water/ Mercedes-Benz used most of those phrases in their latest one and, after reading it, I’d say there is plenty of substance underneath to back these claims up.
The news is: Mercedes-Benz has started large scale production of a new axial flux electric motor at its Berlin-Marienfelde plant, the same site that’s been part of the brand’s powertrain network for over a century. The motor makes its production debut in the (controversial) Mercedes-AMG GT 4-Door Coupe.
What makes an axial flux motor different from the radial flux motors in pretty much every other EV on the road is the fundamental layout. Time to get nerdy: instead of the magnetic field running radially around a central shaft, it runs parallel to the axis of rotation, with two rotors sandwiched around a stator like a disc. The result is a motor that is flatter, lighter, and punches well above its physical size in terms of power density. It all sounds very abstract until you see what it does in the car: three of these motors, working together in what Mercedes calls High Performance Electric Drive Units, get the GT 4-Door Coupe from 0–100 km/h in 2.1 seconds and on to 300 km/h with the Driver’s Package. That’s hypercar territory from a four-door.
The technology itself isn’t new: Mercedes has owned British axial flux specialist YASA since 2021, and the related AMG GT XX concept used the same fundamental approach to set 25 endurance records at Nardò last year, covering more than 40,000 km in a week. What’s news now is that it’s gone from concept and low-volume specialist hardware to full industrial-scale production, with seven assembly lines across three halls and roughly 100 manufacturing steps, a third of which are entirely new to the company. Mercedes says the programme has generated more than 30 patent applications, which tracks, as building axial flux motors at volume has historically been the hard part, not designing them.
There’s a neat symmetry in where this is happening. Berlin-Marienfelde is Mercedes’ oldest manufacturing site, dating back to 1902, and it’s spent the last few years becoming the company’s Digital Factory Campus. Rather than retiring a century-old plant gracefully into irrelevance, Mercedes is using it as the proving ground for the production process it’ll presumably lean on heavily as more AMG.EA-based models arrive.
Mercedes will sell this as the start of a new electric performance era, and it isn’t marketing talk. The engineering is real, the numbers are real, and the choice to industrialise rather than just showcase it tells you Mercedes thinks axial flux is where high-performance EVs are heading, not just a one-off party trick for a concept car.
