Mercedes Benz launched the A45 AMG locally this week. By all accounts it appears as if it is a phenomenal car. But the one thing that is pretty hard to swallow is the price. The entry into an A45 AMG starts at R599 000. This is before you’ve specified tasty wheels, en ‘exclusive pack’ and a number of other nice-to-haves. We managed to spec an A45 AMG into well into the R700k territory but at what point does that start to get very, very expensive for a hot hatch?

Christo and Trevor take a look at the headline figures and then go trawling Autotrader for alternatives. Of course you could always buy a 25 year old Ferrari or 15 year old Porsche, so we narrowed the stakes. Alternatives needed to be less than two years old, have low mileage and we limited the search to R600k, not much more.

What we found surprised even us…

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