Two Houses,
One Throttle
Since 2007, a German performance house and a Florida powerboat builder have shipped a new car-and-boat pairing almost every year. The thirteenth, the Cigarette 41' Nighthawk AMG Black Series, is where the idea reaches full voltage.
Most brand collaborations end at a paint code. The one between Mercedes-AMG and Cigarette Racing has run for more than a decade, produced thirteen boats, and treats the water and the road as two halves of the same engineering argument.
The partnership began in 2007, first as a way to share customers and marketing between two companies that sold the same feeling to the same people. What followed was stranger and more interesting. Almost every year, AMG and the Florida builder unveiled a special-edition boat tied to a specific car from Affalterbach, designed in parallel, finished in matching colors, and built around a shared idea of how performance should feel. Carbon fiber where weight mattered, race-bred power, and a cockpit conceived less like a deck than a driver's seat.
The clearest statement of that thinking arrived on June 24, 2021, when the two companies presented the Cigarette 41' Nighthawk AMG Black Series alongside the road car that inspired it, the Mercedes-AMG GT Black Series. It was the thirteenth boat the partnership had built together, and the most extreme. Where the car carries a single handcrafted twin-turbo V8, the boat carries five supercharged outboards. The numbers tell the rest.
A Black Series for the water
The 41-foot Nighthawk reads as a center console, but the layout is closer to a single-seat philosophy stretched wide. The helm and cabin sit amidships, with walkable side decks and an open bow for seating forward. Beneath it runs Cigarette's refined twin-step hull, the detail that lets a boat this powerful stay efficient at speed. The platform leans heavily on carbon fiber and composite construction, lowering weight to sharpen everything that happens once the throttles open.
Power comes from five 4.6-liter Mercury Racing 450R V8 outboards, 450 horsepower each, for a combined 2,250 horsepower. It is the first boat in its range to wear five engines. The road car answers with a single hand-built 4.0-liter twin-turbo V8 making 720 horsepower. Two completely different routes to the same sensation.
The cabin carries the AMG argument inside. Gray and black dominate, broken by orange accents that quote the exterior, with Cigarette's heat-dissipating Cool upholstery keeping dark surfaces livable under a Florida sun. The helm runs three flush-mounted Garmin displays set into a CNC-milled aluminum dash, its perimeter lit by RGB so the panel appears to float. A digital switching system replaces the wiring loom of a conventional boat, shedding cable weight, and a lithium-ion battery setup does the same while erasing routine maintenance.
The same idea, told twice
On the water
On the road
The Nighthawk is the destination. To understand how the partnership got here, it helps to go back to the beginning, to a year when the most radical boat AMG and Cigarette could imagine ran on no fuel at all. 2013.
The experiments
Before the formula settled, the partnership used these years to test how far a shared idea could travel: an electric concept, a design study, a track car turned center console.
Cigarette AMG Electric Drive Concept
The first car the partnership chose to translate was, improbably, an electric one. Taking the SLS AMG Coupé Electric Drive as its reference, Cigarette and AMG built a powerboat that became, at the time, the fastest and most powerful electric boat in the world. The propulsion produced 1,656 kilowatts and up to 3,000 Nm of torque, figures that sounded like a thought experiment until the boat was in the water.
Inside, the concept stayed faithful to its source: Cigarette's signature sport seats, carbon detailing through the cockpit, a cabin built to echo the car's discipline rather than soften it.
Cigarette Racing 50' Vision GT Concept
In 2014 the boat and the car were developed almost simultaneously, which shows in the result. The Cigarette Racing 50' Vision GT Concept was a single, unrepeatable build, described at launch as the most powerful in its class. The collaboration produced bodywork unique to this hull, including an Alubeam-painted exterior over a custom matte-black bottom, a finish that treated the boat as a show car set on water.
Cigarette Racing Team 41' SD GT3
By 2015 the conversation shifted from concept to competition. The 41' SD GT3 took its cues from the AMG GT3 race car, and carried the reference into its hardware. A pair of 1,100-horsepower Mercury Racing engines drove a hull 41 feet long and 11 feet wide, capable of a limited top speed beyond 100 mph at a weight just over 20,000 pounds.
The detailing followed the car's logic: matte components, a full teak sole, and a marine-grade leather interior, all handworked, all built to read as the GT3's twin rather than its tribute.
The power years
With the language established, the partnership pushed for output: twin race engines, quad-cam monsters, and a hull built from nothing around a million-dollar hypercar.
Cigarette Racing 50 Marauder
2016 gave the partnership its best piece of theater. In the run-up to the Monaco Grand Prix, Mercedes-AMG's two Formula 1 drivers, Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton, took the new boat out for an off-track event built around a single idea: speed and style belong in the same sentence. Two of the sport's fastest men at the helm of a boat that wanted to keep up with them.
The 50 Marauder backed up the staging. It ran the most powerful twin production engines Cigarette was using at the time, a pair of 1,550-horsepower Mercury Racing V8s, carrying the 50-foot hull, nearly nine feet in the beam, to an estimated speed beyond 142 mph.
Cigarette Marauder AMG
The following year sharpened the Marauder around the AMG GT R, the track-focused coupe known for the green that gave it its nickname. The 50-foot boat carried the connection openly, with Green Hell Magno paint accents that read instantly as GT R wherever the hull sat next to its inspiration.
The powertrain was the headline. A pair of Mercury Racing 1550/1350 QC4v engines, the Quad Cam 4 Valve units, paired with M8 stern drives, offered up to 3,100 horsepower. These were dual-calibration engines: the operator could change power levels through an electronic key fob, a detail that turned the throttle into something closer to a drive-mode selector.
Both companies have triumphant roots in racing, and remain devoted to it.Mercedes-AMG and Cigarette Racing, on a shared DNA
Cigarette Racing 515 Project ONE
2018 set the bar where it would stay. Drawn entirely from the most anticipated hypercar of the era, the Mercedes-AMG Project ONE, the Cigarette Racing 515 Project ONE was designed from the ground up with the newest technologies available. The boat measured 51.5 feet and gained a wider beam of nearly ten feet, room enough to seat six in comfort without diluting the focus.
Built to bespoke standards and tested in punishing conditions, the 515 made the partnership's thesis explicit. Two companies with the same racing instinct, building the same machine in two different mediums.
The refinement
The last two years before the flagship widened the brief: a four-door grand tourer's discipline, then the first time the partnership reached for the word yacht.
Cigarette AMG Carbon Edition
The 2019 boat took its cue from an unusual source: the four-door AMG GT 63 S Coupé, a car that argued performance and everyday usability were not opposites. The 41-foot Cigarette AMG Carbon Edition, the eleventh boat the partnership had co-developed, carried that same balance into the water, setting fresh marks for performance, handling, and versatility through lightweight construction and design.
Cigarette Tirranna AMG Edition
2020 was the year the partnership stretched its own definition. The 59-foot Cigarette Tirranna AMG Edition arrived alongside a Mercedes-AMG G 63 Cigarette Edition, the boxy off-roader recast as a companion piece. Where every prior boat had been a center console first, the Tirranna struck a deliberate balance between a luxury yacht and a speed-focused center console, setting new standards in both performance and design.
It was, in effect, the partnership rehearsing scale. A year later, the lessons would converge on a 41-foot hull and 2,250 horsepower.
Thirteen boats, one partnership
Cigarette 41' Nighthawk AMG Black Series
And so the line returns to where it opened. On June 24, 2021, the thirteenth boat met the GT Black Series that named it: 2,250 horsepower across five outboards on the water, 720 from a single hand-built V8 on the road. Fourteen years of experiments, power and refinement, resolved into one pairing running the same channel side by side.
Fourteen years on, the collaboration still answers the same question it started with in 2007: what happens when two builders who chase speed for a living agree to chase it together. The water and the road keep trading the lead. The pairing is the point.