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Am I the only one that gets irritated when all the journalists refer to it as the Sport Light. I really should try and chill a bit. Mercedes has always referred to it recently as Super.
From Wikipaedia
Mercedes-Benz did not announce what the abbreviation "SL" meant when the car was introduced.
"Leicht is either "easy" as an adverb or "light" as an adjective in German. Defining a car it has to mean "Light".
It is often assumed that the letters stand for Sport Leicht. One car magazine in 2012 declared that the abbreviation "SL" - "securitized and personally signed by Rudolf Uhlenhaut " meant Super Leicht. This contradicts "Mercedes-Benz 300 SL" of Engelen / Riedner / Seufert, which was produced in close cooperation with Rudolf Uhlenhault showing that the abbreviation meant Sport Leicht.
Mercedes-Benz used both forms until 2017. It was even called Super Super. On the company website it was called Sport Leicht until 2017 and then changed to Super Leicht.
For a long time it was unclear what intention the company had at the time when assigning the letter combination. It was not until the beginning of 2017 that a chance finding in the corporate archive clarified that the abbreviation SL stood for Super-Leicht."
I own both an S and an SL. I believe the S designates it as a member of the S-Series. The S meaning "Super" seems like a good interpretation since the S is Mercedes' ultimate vehicle offering. And the L designates it as a lightweight model of the S series. It's not light, but it's certainly lighter than an S.
Super Easy certainly seems the better connotation. . . closer to driving a 4000 pound luxury sofa than any true sports car.
At the same time it's fast, handles rather well for the weight and is 'plush'. As others have noted elsewhere, it is a rather fine example of a GT car
04-13-2021, 03:06 PM
