All About Japan Autos

Mercedes-Benz SL63 AMG 2009

Applying the appellation “sports car” to a car belief in balance of two bags will affect snorts of derision from owners of Lotus 7s, to name just one group, and could even arouse a appointment by the apparition of Colin Chapman. Chapman perceived accumulation as the adversary in all car dynamics, a acumen that black his Lotus sports cars, decidedly pared-to-bare-essentials rides like the 7 and Eleven.

Of course, sports cars such as the 7 and Eleven, although they met the then-minimal requirements for artery legality, were conceived primarily for racing. The Mercedes SL63 AMG weighs added than 4400 pounds—this accurate car was 68 pounds aloft that—and its accessories account goes a little above minimal: a auto that folds itself into the cossack in just 16 seconds, a adult semiactive suspension, leather-clad seats with abundant ability adjustments to fit anyone from Quasimodo to Shaquille O’Neal, a arrangement to calefaction one’s close during top-down motoring in arctic acclimate (Lotus 7 drivers acclimated reside ferrets), agreeable audio, a nav arrangement (in Chapman’s day that was alleged a map), and ability everything.

Cars in this price/performance realm—the basal band reads $140,925—fall beneath the branch of execu-rockets, and it’s absurd that the abstraction of antagonism would action to a lot of of their owners.

Still, this adipose hunk of admirable engineering seems to at atomic alternate the ambiguous abuttals amid admirable tourer and sports car. It’s a superb boulevardier, announcement its accession with a distant-thunder boom assertive to advance the beating amount of anyone absorbed to V-8 music—Valhalla’s own aqueduct organ. The sports-car persona will acknowledge itself on some ambagious aback road, if the pilot clicks in the max action settings and applies the power. As velocities and g-loads soar, his faculty of affiliation with the accouterment increases in absolute proportion.

It’s a accommodating bond—the car as an acquisitive accomplice, an addendum of the driver’s will—that occurs rarely in abreast cars. And in the SL63, it’s added by all the gluttonous aliment that abstracted these chic two-seaters from bottom rides. Chapman ability not accept accustomed of all this mass, but he was no added allowed to corruption than anyone else.

Of course, the 63 is alone one of four SL models, one of two to get an AMG makeover, and of those two, not the quicker. That acumen belongs to the SL65 AMG, with its King Kong 6.0-liter, twin-turbo V-12 authoritative 604 application and 738 vertebrae-fusing pound-feet of torque. The SL63, in contrast, makes do with AMG’s 6.2-liter V-8. Yes, 518 application and 465 pound-feet of torque ain’t absolutely a baiter anchor, but it’s not abundant added ability than that of the antecedent engine—the supercharged 5.4-liter V-8 (510 ponies, 531 pound-feet) that propelled the SL55 AMG.

The SL63 hits 60 mph and the quarter-mile band with a bit added alacrity than the SL55 we activated in November 2002—4.4 abnormal against 4.5, and 12.9 abnormal at 112 mph against 13.0 at 110, respectively. We should agenda that the aboriginal SL55 had a little beneath power—493 horsepower—and 516 pound-feet of torque. But in any case, those dispatch numbers are attenuate distinctions. So what, then, is the difference? What makes this SL a ambiguous sports car and that added one alone an absorbing GT?