Car of the Year Awards 2026: Best hot hatch
First and foremost, a great performance car is entertaining and involving to drive, but unlike pure sports cars, they also have to be practical and comfortable enough to use every day...
Mercedes-AMG A45 S Plus
If you were to place the Mercedes-AMG A45 on the Scoville scale (the unit used to measure spice), it’d probably sit right up with Pepper X, the current record holder and 2.7 million Scovilles hotter than the next-spiciest pepper. Yes, it truly puts the ‘hot’ in ‘hot hatch’.
With 416bhp from a 2.0-litre engine, the A45 crushes you into your seat when you floor the accelerator pedal, getting from 0-62mph at a pace that would have threatened supercars not too long ago.
There’s more to it than just straight-line pace, though. When the road gets twisty, the A45 has sharper handling than its closest rival, the Audi RS3. Its adaptive suspension’s firmest mode all but eradicates body lean through corners, and its clever four-wheel drive system shuffles power between the wheels to help you corner with greater speed and agility.
To help you take advantage of that, the A45’s ultra-precise steering is more feelsome than the RS3’s and gives you a great idea of what the car is doing as you fire through corners.
True, the A45 is fairly firm riding, and it’s obviously nowhere near as practical as the BMW M3 Touring, but it is virtually as easy to live with as a regular A-Class hatchback.
