Mercedes-AMG breaks through the one-million dollar roof with its new SL 55 4Matic+ roadster

2023 Mercedes-AMG SL 55 4Matic+

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Launched: Febraury 2023 – Price S$1,005,888 with COE (April 2023)
Two-door, luxury sports car, four seats
476hp, 4.0-litre turbocharged V8, VES C2, 13.4L/100km

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PROS
That V8 engine noise
Supercar level handling
Equally capable as a cruiser

CONS
User interface too reliant on touchscreens
Understated cabin
That big price tag

SINGAPORE

Well they’ve gone and done it. With the increase in ARF taxes earlier this year, mid and upper-tier luxury car prices in Singapore have really gone through the roof. The Mercedes-AMG SL 55, like the new BMW XM hybrid SUV, have both slammed through the one-million dollar price ceiling. While seven-digit price tags are the norm for cars from Rolls-Royce, the fact that products from mainline Mercedes and BMW brands have reached this state tells us a lot about the business of selling and taxing cars in Singapore.

Yet, Mercedes-AMG wants you to believe that the SL 55 4Matic+ driven here is no ordinary Mercedes-AMG. It’s the top-spec AMG car of the moment, and its chassis will also form the backbone of the next-generation AMG GT, the brand’s halo car and set for a 2025 launch. The SL name is also a significant one, having been part of the brand’s heritage since 1954 with the famous 300 SL and its gullwing doors.  

Once again it’s worth stating that a Mercedes-AMG is in a totally different league as a car that’s just badged as a Mercedes-Benz, AMG Line. The former is a properly serious performance car designed for dynamic driving with a manic engine under the bonnet, while the latter is always just a bog-standard Mercedes-Benz with a bolt-on bodykit and fancy wheels. They just look fancy, but AMG Line parts do not make your Mercedes-Benz a sports car the way a real AMG car always is.

Under the bonnet of the curvaceous SL 55 is 4.0-litre, twin-turbo V8 petrol engine, that in the usual AMG tradition, is signed by the builder who assembled it.

The world may be infatuated with electric vehicles right now and there are plenty of electric cars in the Mercedes-EQ lineup including the very comfortable and terrifyingly fast AMG EQS 53, but the SL 55 is still all about old-school petrol power. There’s 476 horses worth of it from the engine, along with a colossal torque output of 700Nm. The only reasonable way to put all that power to the ground tidily through road tyres is through four-wheel drive, of which the SL 55 has too.

The other bits of tech worth mentioning include its four-wheel steering system, ride control adaptive suspension system, Airpanel automatic inlet closure, and active aerodynamics.

It’s a big 2+2 roadster, with serviceable rear seats that will seat two passengers up to 1.5-metres tall (i.e. children). In practice, shortish adults will still be able to ride in them, as the legroom is still reasonable and not totally absent like what you would experience in a Porsche 911 coupe.

Mercedes states that it has fitted a folding soft top to the car rather than a metal roof as it represents a substantial weight saving of 21kg, helping to give the car a lower centre of gravity. 

An air neck scarf channels warm air around the front seat passengers when activated, and you can see the fans doing this work inside the vent screens on the seat headrests, but it’s not a feature that will see use in Singapore. 

The interior is all top-spec AMG stuff, with massage seats, a Burmester audio system, and perfect stitching in all directions. A feature that’s unique to the SL for now is the electronically tiltable main display screen, designed so that sun glare can be eliminated when driving with the roof down.

Folding the roof, which can be done with the car moving at up to 60km/h, can be done either by a double click followed by holding the button on the centre console, or by sliding and then holding a ‘button’ on the main touch pad. Seems like a decent idea in theory, but we found that the screen gets very, very hot in use. It’s manageable with the air conditioning running, but with the roof down and the sun shining directly on it, the touch panel gets too hot to handle after 10 minutes or so of exposure.  

There’s the by now standard fancy customisable ambient lighting and Mercedes’ proprietary automatic seat adjustment that sets it based on your height, but for a million-dollar car, one can’t help but feel a little underwhelmed by the apparent lack of drama to the whole cabin package.

What it lacks in cabin razzmatazz however, it makes up for in its excellent sense of occasion when the car gets driven.

To Page 2: The Driving Experience

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