Inside AMG’s 186-MPH Charging Marathon: 25 Records in Under 8 Days

If you want to prove an all-electric performance platform belongs on the world stage, you do something that sounds a little impossible. Mercedes-AMG set out to “drive around the planet” in Italy, targeting 24,901 miles on the Nardò ring with two Concept AMG GT XX prototypes and a round-the-clock support crew. Seventeen drivers rotated stints, including Formula One racer George Russell, while fire and rescue teams, mechanics, and engineers kept the operation moving without a pause.

The plan was simple and extreme: cover the farthest distance in the shortest time. Over 3,177 laps and 7 days, 13 hours, 24 minutes, and 7 seconds, the pair of cars not only reached the goal, they stacked up 25 long-distance records. One headline stat says it all: 3,404 miles covered in 24 hours, beating the previous mark by more than 940 miles. By the end, the odometers had already sailed past 25,000 miles in less than 8 days.

There was nothing casual about the pace. Drivers settled on 186 miles per hour as the sweet spot, the best blend of outright speed and efficient charging. The only stops were for energy, averaging 850 kilowatts on the plugs, and that cadence held for nearly 8 days. Imagine the rhythm: charge, launch, hold a laser-straight line at autobahn-with-no-traffic velocity, repeat. Imagine the focus it takes to watch the lap counter tick past three thousand while the crew trades headsets and the sun rises over a perfectly circular horizon.

The test was designed to beat up the powertrain on purpose. High-load running and high-speed charging create the toughest heat and stress cycles for batteries, inverters, and motors. The AMG team wanted to see those components pushed, cooled, and pushed again, proving that performance does not have to be a short sprint followed by a long wait at the plug. “The goal is to redefine the limits of what is technically possible in the age of electric drives,” said chief technology officer Markus Schäfer, and this run feels like a tangible step toward that future.

Under the floor sits the AMG.EA platform, operating at 800 volts with a liquid-cooled battery and three axial-flux motors packaged into two electric drive units for all-wheel traction. In concept tune the system delivers more than 1,360 horsepower, out-muscling the Lucid Air’s headline figure and only trailing the Xiaomi SU7 Ultra’s 1,548 horsepower. But the bigger story is not a dyno sheet. It is the consistency: lap after lap at 186 miles per hour and charge after charge at 850 kilowatts. That is how you turn a concept into a credible promise.