The new Beijing AMG Performance Center is the first to stand alone and apart from a Mercedes dealership.
Forget rickshaws and bicycles, China is already the world’s largest auto market – and rapidly overtaking the United States when it comes to luxury car sales, as well. No surprise, then, that Mercedes-Benz is breaking ground with the world’s first store specifically dedicated to the maker’s high-performance brand-within-a-brand AMG.
The opening of the new Beijing Sanlitun AMG Performance Center conveniently marks the start of the 2012 Beijing Motor Show where, appropriately enough, the German maker formally took the wraps off the new G63 and G65 AMG sport-utility vehicles.
Once happy to trot out the occasional AMG model for a limited run, Mercedes today offers more than a dozen different models in the performance sub-brand – with 16 planned for the U.S. market by the end of this year. And it is using the new AMG Performance Centers to more directly target interested buyer. But of the 195 global locations, the one in the upscale Beijing neighborhood is unique in selling only AMG products, rather than mixing them in with mere pedestrian Mercedes products.
“Here in Sanlitun Village North we enjoy a premium location, one where customers and all those interested can experience our brand claim “Driving Performance” intensely. The new store will act as an example for future “stand-alone” Performance Centers which are planned for other metropolis”, said Ola Källenius, chairman of the Board of Management of Mercedes-AMG GmbH, during the opening of the new store.
The more than 4,000 square-foot, two-level facility was designed to be a showpiece itself, its avante garde architecture designed to emphasize both the AMG product and technology “story.” The walls on the main floor are made entirely of white, high-gloss glass, for example, with integrated screens playing out various video themes. The walls are contrasted by a black granite flood.
A central turntable can be used to highlight different vehicles, such as the SLS AMG currently on display.
Meanwhile, there’s an extensive line-up of models tucked into a basement garage which AMG officials say will be ready “for spur-of-the-moment test drives.”
The opening of the new AMG Performance Center helps mark the brand’s 45th anniversary. And the choice of the central Sanlitun Village North location puts the store in the heart of Beijing’s most upscale downtown locations, where there’s a high level of traffic, especially among potential AMG buyers, the maker explains.
Mercedes plans to open still more stand-alone AMG Performance Centers but it is clear it sees a huge opportunity in China, where demand for high-line luxury products is growing fast despite the minimal number of open roads nearby to push them to their limits.
Then again, that hasn’t stopped buyers in the U.S., which currently accounts for more than a quarter of all AMG sales – about half of those in traffic-snarled Southern California.