Mercedes Roadster SLS AMG (2012) – Review
The car is powered by a 6.2-liter V-8 that awakens with a thunderclap each time you push the glowing red starter button.
WHAT IS IT? The high-flying two-seat supercar with a folding cloth roof in place of its gullwing doors.
HOW MUCH? $196,975 base, $231,325 as tested, including Bang & Olufsen 1,000-watt sound system ($6,400), 19-inch forged wheels ($3,400) and carbon-fiber engine compartment trim ($5,400).
WHAT’S UNDER THE HOOD? 6.2-liter V-8 (563 horsepower, 479 pound-feet of torque) with 7-speed dual-clutch automated manual transmission.
IS IT “THIRSTY”? Rated at 14 m.p.g. in town and 20 on the highway, the SLS is subject to a $1,700 gas-guzzler tax.
The SLS’s identity, its drama, is bound up in those beautifully engineered, beautifully unnecessary doors. Granted, burying a pair of hinges on the middle of the roof dictates an imperfect roofline, one that’s somehow just a little too upright and plunges too quickly to meet the aft end of the car. But any stylistic misgivings are forgotten when you indulge in the SLS coupe’s over-the-top ingress and egress. If you’re looking to make a bold exit, popping a top-hinged door is the next best thing to being shot out of a cannon.
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Of course, nobody needs gullwing doors, and that’s why I love them despite the aesthetic penalty they incur. I ask you, would Mike Tyson look better without his face tattoo? Yes. Would he be as interesting? No.
Of course, we’re talking about degrees of outrageousness, but I say the coupe is more striking than the droptop. And for $200,000, I’d like as much preposterousness as possible.
Certainly the SLS Roadster won’t get lost in the parking lot of any Costco or celebrity rehab center. Its proportions are so cab-rearward that parallel parking makes one pine for bow thrusters or the guidance of a good harbor pilot. I measured the hood — not the whole front end of the car, but just the actual hinged lid over the engine bay — and found it a shade over five feet long. Snooki could tan on this thing. For all I know, maybe she has.
Beneath that hood is a 6.2-liter V-8 that awakens with a thunderclap each time you push the glowing red starter button. Pragmatic supercar shoppers, if such people exist, will note that this motor is already obsolete compared with the new turbocharged 5.5-liter V-8 that’s percolating through the AMG lineup. That smaller engine makes far more torque while returning improved fuel economy, and it’s destined to force the old high-revving brute to the sidelines. But I have a hard time imagining that a turbocharged motor will ever belt out noises like this one.
Most cars strive to make you forget that the internal combustion engine is powered by a series of controlled explosions. The SLS not only celebrates that fact, it seems to gleefully send a few uncontrolled explosions cannonballing down the exhaust manifold whenever you back off the throttle or downshift.
This is the sound of precision machinery hand-built by a German craftsman with an umlaut in his name. (In fact, that gentleman signed the motor, and my thanks go out to Herr Günther on a job well done.)
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There are a few practical challenges to driving a car that looks like the loaner you get when the Batmobile is in for service. The SLS Roadster is so low that you’ll need to use your polo mallet to reach the keypad of a drive-through A.T.M. With the top up, your outward visibility is only slightly better than that of a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey contestant.
On a related note, the vast prow means that you quickly perfect a move that I call the SLS Intersection Peek, wherein you cautiously edge out until you can spot oncoming traffic. If you spy a Tahoe bearing down, you reverse for a few feet, because by the time you’ve got visual clearance on your flanks, the hood is protruding halfway into the perpendicular lane. See, rich people have problems, too.
But if one of those problems is deciding between the SLS coupe and convertible, allow me to help. Lots of new cars have folding tops, but only one has wings.
Post: Tram Nguyen
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