MERCEDES-AMG SL55 4MATIC+
Smooth operator
In the Steve Martin film LA Story, his character Harris Telemacher’s existential crisis is amplified by his job: he’s a TV weatherman in a city in which the weather is always the same, warm and sunny. Well this is Harris’s lucky day, for LA’s famous palm trees are being bent double by a mighty storm, the rain is bouncing off the freeway, and the sky is apocalyptically gloomy.
Good for Harris, not so much the new Mercedes SL. This seventh generation of the company’s signature sports car reintroduces a classic soft-top roof after a 20-year dalliance with a bulky folding hard-top. It’s done wonders for the SL’s looks but it’s staying firmly in place for now, as I make my way up the Ortega Highway that connects Southern California’s Orange County with Riverside. Apparently this is one of the deadliest roads in the US, a 28-mile long stretch that’s part of an old Native American trail and said to be haunted. Bikers love it. It’s currently strewn with rubble and rocks dislodged from the surrounding scenery, adding a frisson to a road that’s already doing its best to spook me. The outgoing SL might not have fancied this so much; the new one immediately feels like a much sharper instrument. Faster steering, superior body control, far more agile.
This is a big reset for a model whose roots lie in the race-bred Fifties original and came to epitomise a slinky Hollywood elegance. Clark Gable, Bobby Ewing and Richard Gere’s American Gigolo all favoured the SL, car as pop culture barometer. But lately it had mislaid its mojo which is why this new AMG-developed model features a clean-sheet-of-paper chassis that borrows nothing from any existing Mercedes. It imports the latest MBUX user interface from the S-Class but with some SL-specific twists, including a central display that tilts to avoid reflections. Won’t be an issue today.