With its red-state styling and reassuring heft, the Mercedes-Benz SL has attracted the likes of bankers, barons, and busty housewives for the last six decades.
The SL’s reputation congealed through a curious combination of conservative marketing, aggressive engineering, and a meticulously crafted Hollywood presence — from High Society to American Gigolo, each generation of the German roadster came factory equipped with the whiff of a certain something, a range-topping aura that has set the pace for the triple-pointed star lineup.
But focused, purebred performance? Not so much. For a real kick in the pants, spendy car freaks tended to plant their Tod’s driving moccasins on the accelerator pedals of other Deutschland drives, namely BMWs and Porsches.
Driver detachment grew in tandem with the SL’s burgeoning body mass index until drastic measures were finally taken with the sixth-generation roadster. For 2013, der neue SL introduced lighter, stiffer aluminum underpinnings that veer closer to the spirit of the car’s original “Sport Light” designation. In spite of its unconvincing aesthetic sensibilities — this is a convertible only a wind tunnel could love — the newfound lightness prompted me to land the entry-level SL550 on my Wired Lust List. And yet lust, like all irrational emotions, is a relative force, and that sliding scale has since escalated to the next tier of automotive lasciviousness, the new SL63 AMG.
When I got the chance to sample the latest demon child from Affalterbach, I quite frankly became conflicted over the SL63almost immediately following my first press of the “start engine” button. On one hand, its 275 pounds of weight loss and power leap to 530 hp make it devilishly quick and noticeably more lively, with palpable, feel-it-at-the-wheel maneuverability. But while it’s admittedly more handsome than its more pedestrian counterpart, the SL63 has also been gussied up by the oldest visual tricks in the tuner handbook: spoilers and ground effects. Understated as they may be, they’re still a reminder that beneath all the go-fast trinkets, the SL’s bones aren’t exactly supermodel material. Adding insult to injury, some its dermatological features aren’t even functional; the straked “vents” just aft of the front wheels are decorative, about as useful to engine cooling as a trumpet to a sea bass. You can practically hear Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler groaning in their graves.
But from the driver seat, faith renews. The small center console-mounted aluminum dial, when set to Sport+, unleashes a ferocious flow of torque from the twin-turbocharged 5.5-liter V8, summoning a rush of forward motion that yields an official zero-to-sixty time of 4.2 seconds. Proving that the geeks shall inherit the earth (or at least the dynamometer bragging rights), the $9,000 AMG Performance Package yields a 27 horsepower gain and 74 more pound-feet of torque, a tenth of a second advantage in the 0- to 60-mph sprint, and a top speed boosted to 186 mph — all essentially thanks to a software hack to the engine ECU.
Take that, jocks!
As inspiringly competent as this German sled proved itself to be, I observed two weak links during my test drive. First, though gearshifts came flawlessly fast and smooth in automatic mode, tapping the paddle shifters resulted in a slight lag. How is the computer capable of doing such an impeccable job of shifting, but resisting human input so stubbornly? The other sore spot was the electromechanical steering, which felt less than optimal on one tester, and more lacking in feedback on another. Tobias Moers, AMG’s head of vehicle development, didn’t disagree, saying his team was fully aware if the issue and that it would take “no more than two days of software re-programming to fix the steering before it goes to production.” In other words, Team Geek can pull it together. We hope.
Does the lighter, quicker, more fuel-efficient and better-handling SL63 win on all fronts? At $146,695, it’s mighty expensive, and the price only soars as the options pile on. The BMW M6 Convertible, at 4,508 lbs, is too portly to be considered a serious sports car, but its $113,995 cost also makes it a relative steal, especially when a heavily equipped SL63 can easily approach the mighty SLS AMG’s $189,600 price tag. Then there’s the AMG’s sheetmetal which, while admittedly sexier than the standard SL’s, won’t be on permanent display at the Louvre any time soon.
You’ll pay dearly for the privilege of becoming a member of the newest and fastest SL club, which for most drivers is still a heady place to be; this is, after all, one of the most stirring SLs to grace the world’s roads, and a potent status symbol, to boot. But for the well-heeled and eternally nitpicky, this high-priced roadster might be a couple of heartbeats away from inspiring unfettered lust.
WIRED The only way to commute between the Gulfstream and the Palmer Johnson. Sprightly in a sprint, spry in the esses. More power than Gozer the Gozerian.
TIRED Other cars offer more bang for your (copious) bucks. Laggy manual shifting. Un-pretty, and the bunting is cheesy. Occassionally buggy assisted steering in my tester, but this should be cleared up in the future.
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