Many of you R230 owners may have traded up from the R129 model.

I am a new 1999 SL 500 owner (since DEc 2002) and really enjoy the car a lot.

The motor and drive train has not changed much since 1999. The ABC system sounds good. Brake by wire sounds good.

The new sheet metal and retractable hard top are certainly hot!

As SL 500 owners with much more experience than I ... what observations about R129s and R230s would you care to share?

 

if you compare your model to the older sl model that is the difference from your model up to the new r230. every time mercedes upgrades the sl it has been too many improvements to list. the new sl suspension and other designs are great.

 

I drive my R129 and R230 back to back and the R129 does now feel very dated. Still a good car, very well made but dated nonetheless. Not surprising, the car first saw the light of day in 1989, so your car was a 10 year old design when it was made, with design influences stretching back into the early-mid 80s. It'll soon be 20 years since someone starting thinking about Project R129.

Your SL500 will be after the second make-over (chrome rimmed dials?) but still the R230 has it beat in terms of design and performance. The roadholding in particular is much better than the R129 thanks to the ABC. You don't notice it so much on a highway but on a twisty, the R230 is much more composed. My SL600 by the way has the worst handling of any of the R129s because of its huge weight up front, very nose heavy, reluctant to turn in and the Adaptive Damping System - a very basic form of ABC - does nothing much to improve it.

The R129 had a much longer life than we might have expected but the good news is that the R230 then escaped the dreadful build quality problems of the models introduced in the early to mid 90's. By the time the guys were sharpening their pencils to work on the R230, they knew thay had to sort out build quality. Even so, the SL was 5 years in the making, I guess because there were other priorities and also because the SL was always going to trailblaze some new technologies like SBC.

 

To: blue SL

Yes 1999 has crome dials.

To read yor compairison of R230 to R129 as R129 to 560 SL ... says a lot for R230.

I can't wait to drive one!

 

The R230 is certainly better than the R129, but that is not to say the R129 is not a fine car. I'm loathe to get rid of mine which I use as my daily driver...

 

The only thing that I dislike about the R230 is the rear. It looks too similar to a Pontiac. Even today, the R129 has a very solid and classic look about it. But after 10 years, the R129 is no longer a head-turner.

 

I agree, the back of the R230 is dictated by the need to accomodate the roof, so that must have imposed some design constraints on what the designers would ideally have liked. But, overall, it's a much more successful design that the Lexus but it does look better IMHO with the roof down than up.

 

In the early 1990s I distinctly remember seeing the then new SL 500 for the first time, thinking how amazing the R129 styling was.

Over the next ten or twelve years, car stying industry wide has come a long way. As the professional car writers wrote, the R129 styling had gotten a little long in the tooth.

I note that even when I had just bought the 1999 R129 in Dec / 02, I found myself noting to a couple of friends (what what internet_mafia just wrote) that the R129 is not really a head-turner. They all politely disagreed.

There is no doubt in my mind that it is a handsome car that has no styling flaws. The R129 is a unique design that has no other car that closely resembel it.

That does seem to be the plague of a few cars ... Jaguar XK8s remind me of a Taurus. The rear of the Accord has emmulated the R230 which resembles a Grand Prix, etc.

I'm not sure that in the R129's run, if it became as much of a clasic as the previous 450SL to 560SL run. Those cars still look great. My head still turns when one drives by.

When in the market in Dec / 02 ... I quickly decided I simply did not like "old" cars when test driving a 1989 560 SL. No matter how good it looked.

As one automotive journalist wrote in the past six months or so: "Mercedes is definitly on top of their styling game".

I'm not a long time follower of these things, but it seems when the E Class came out a few years ago, with the round headlights and aerodynamic grill arrangements ... there has been no looking back.

All the previous S Class, E Class, C Class and now SL Class cars ... once restyled the prvious stylings were made practically obsolite by the new stylings.

The R230 did a much better job of storing away the hard top while not getting as bulky in the rear quarters as the Lexus LS 430.

This is all very subjective and a matter of personal opinion.

Those R230s do look great! You are very fortunate individuals to own them. Congratulations!

 

It's also interesting that even now, Jaguar (aka Ford) and Aston Martin (aka Ford) will sell you a convertible which just dumps a bunch of frame and fabric behind you, restricting rear vision and looking unbearably crude.

Mercedes had them beat with the (manual) roof in the 107 series dating from 1971 and the even older Pagoda SL dating from the early 60's. The R129 moved the game forwards by making it fully automatic, no manual headrail latches, just press the button and it's the pattern which companies like BMW and Audi have followed.

Mercedes re-invented the storable hardtop in the SLK with a much more space efficient design than the ones in the 50/60's in the US; Lexus copied their design in the usual Japanese way and now a number of other European and Japanese manufacturers are going the same way.

The operation of the R230 roof is a joy to behold, even more so than the R129 roof and that's pretty neat!!

The R129 design might have dated more quickly than the previous generation but it's more a reflection of the more rapidly evolving car design now compared to 15 years ago.

 

According to one professional writer, the ABC system still allows the driver to feel the suspension working is twisty turns ... yet is as stable as pushing a brick arrounf on a table top.

That must be a great sensation of control.

As I push and play (with my new to me, 1999 R129) with cornering, understeeer (usuallywhen ESP interveens) and over steer situations ... I wonder when does this car get pushed beyond it's limit?

I guess I'll have to find a flat, large and vacant patch of dry asphalt to exeriment with this.

I grew up in the Canadian country, skidding arround on gravel roads, in the wet, in snow and ice with all sorts of non-sporty vehicles.

The dry pavement, high speed loss of control is not known to me.

I have taken corners at 2 or 3 times the posted warning speed limit. Have heard the tires howel arround the corner. Yet everthing seems to be well composed.

Is it a matter or just letting oof the gas in gross under and over steer situations?

Some feedback from you more aggressive & experienced drivers would be appreciated.