blueSL

For what it's worth, Jeremy Clarkson, who is one of the best known car reviewers in the UK (please note I did not say "best car reviewers", you either like him or hate him, I hate him) has bought an SL55, Topas, Alpaca, Multi-Spoke, Distronic, No Parktronic, Keyless Go, Linguatronic

He was writing about it in the UK Sunday Times, not much about the car, more a tirade about the service he received from his Mercedes dealer and Mercedes UK. Mind you, he does have the most over-inflated ego you're ever likely to come across.

Canuck

Jeremy is not the smallest guy in the world either so if he can fit so can the rest of us.

Richard

And he managed to skip the waiting list (by the looks of the article in todays Sunday Times), so he has nothing to whinge about !!

Especially as he is in the UK, and if he paid the money he could have had any colour he liked. But I guess he didnt want to wait for it ...

Tezta

I like Jeremy, i have some of his videos where he did reports on the lamborghini line, and some other exotic cars. I think they are a lot better than motor trend TV in the states.

VroomVroom

"What you're about to see is the difference between a really really fast car and the McLaren F1!"

morebhp

I also like to read Jeremy's reports - very amusing although I do not always agree with what he has to say.

Interestingly he did an article in the times recently saying would you dare to own a SL500 - hinting it may be considered a hairdressers car! (One for the girls for non UK readers). In which he stated he felt the SL55 might be a real man's car.

Annoying how MB pandered to his whims to get a demo drive for him and supplied a car within weeks, despite him not being on the waiting list.

More amusingly after this that he spends most of his article slamming their customer service :p

blueSL

You can imagine him throwing his toys out of the pram when told there was a three year waiting list.

GMW

Well, his purchase is surely going to be quite amusing. If he doesn't like it, then he hates it. If he likes it then he loves it. There is rarely any in-between with this guy.

Personally, I like him. His stories have always proven to be a good source of entertainment with a few good chuckles thrown in.

From my years of watching him on Top Gear and reading his articles he is a very picky fellow and if he likes the SL55 then it must be bloody good as he gets to drive practically all the cars on earth

I tend to find my views of cars closely resemble his though not to some of his extremes. (blowing up a metro?)

GMW

Can anyone post it for the rest of us to read?


greatly appreciated

blueSL

Here's the article:

Test: Jeremy Clarkson: Drives his Mercedes SL55 AMG

It is a staggering noise, a bellow, the sound of wanton consumption

Bit by bit the cornerstones of my youth are being taken away. There's an ache behind my left knee, I don't smoke any more, I have a favourite chair in the sitting room, and if you rang this afternoon asking me out tonight I'd have to say: "Ah, bit tricky actually; no babysitter. Another time perhaps."

This is middle-age speak for: "What? On a Sunday? You must be joking, sunshine."

Only last week after an exciting, colourful day in London I drove home, turned off the engine and, for the first time ever, noticed the peace. More than that, I actually sat in the car for a little while savouring it. Then later in the evening I did something I have never done before: I fell asleep in front of the television.

It's not that I'm tired of life, but I am aware of it. I'm aware that the fog-bank of senility toward which I'm careering is a darn sight closer than the hopelessness of childhood, which is now a mere pin***** in the rear-view mirror. I'm also aware that if this were 1702, rather than 2002, I'd be dead. So I've swapped the Ferrari for a Mercedes-Benz.

Now whenever I've bought a car in the past I've never really thought about it properly and I've usually ended up with the wrong model in the wrong colour with the wrong level of equipment. But I'm an old bull now so I rang the Mercedes HQ in Milton Keynes and asked if they could arrange a test drive.

The girl laughed and said there were no SL 55s in the country. Even when I explained that the small ads in this very paper were full of them, she remained adamant. Then her boss rang back and that afternoon an SL 55 was delivered.

I loved it and rang Mercedes once more to ask if they'd send a brochure and colour chart. Three days later I rang them again and then three days after that. This time I gave them a week before ringing again, but still no brochure was forthcoming so I picked one up from the local dealer.

It was useless. There were endless hieroglyphics in endless columns saying that if I bought the AMG version I couldn't have standard wheels, and that if I wanted special AMG wheels, which are a no-cost option on the SL 500, I'd have to pay an extra £1,400. Not that they're currently available anyway. I don't want to sound like Michael Winner, but why can't I have what I bloody well want?

That's before we get to the colour chart. I'd sort of assumed that with a £90,000 car I'd be able to take along a scrap of material from my old school cap or an aubergine and ask them to match it. Aston Martin offers this service. So does TVR. So does Dulux. But not Mercedes. It offers green, blue, red, white, grey, black, silver or racing gold.

And you're supposed to choose after studying a swatch the size of a stamp and which, it turns out, bears absolutely no relation to the colour that goes onto the car.

I went for topaz (grey) and that meant I had to have grey seats and a silver dash. None of the other combinations is possible on an SL 55.

This is pathetic. What I should have done, of course, is storm out of the dealership and buy something else. But what? A BMW Z8? A Jaguar XKR? A Porsche 911? None of them is quite as good as the Merc.

The AMG SL is used as a safety car at Formula One grands prix, and if you listen carefully when it's out on the track you can actually hear it. A rumbling baritone backdrop to the tenor and soprano F1 motors. It is a staggering noise, a bellow, the sound of wanton consumption.

I haven't had a chance to do any meaningful fuel economy tests but I can report that the needle seems to be in a gravity field all of its own. I'm anticipating 15mpg but I'm also anticipating colossal performance in return. Once I've done a thousand miles and full throttle becomes available I'm going to be doing 200mph. Maybe a bit more.

Actually, performance is only part of the SL's appeal. Looks, as ever, figure just as high, but best of all, of course, is that roof. Push a button and 11 seconds later it's in the boot.

So what we have here is a 200mph automatic coupe. A wind-in-the-hair paddle-shift convertible. A full-on, supercharged Tara Palmer Nascar that when you're not in the mood becomes as quiet and as unobtrusive as Nell McAndrew. And there are so many gadgets the handbook is 539 pages long. Simon Schama got A History of Britain into less than that.

I have Linguatronic which costs an extra £310 and lets me bark instructions at the dash. I tell it what I want to listen to and after it's said "Pardon?" a few times it obeys. I had great fun this morning ordering it to delete Radio One. For ever. Then I tried to teach it to say "What?" not "Pardon?", but with limited success.

I can also tell it which numbers I'd like to dial. Well, that's the theory but Mercedes forgot to fit the phone so let's move on and talk about the £970 Keyless-Go. I simply keep a credit card-sized smart card in my wallet and when I walk up to the car it opens. I then start it by pressing a button on top of the gear lever.

Friends have been hugely impressed by this. Well, they've pretended to be anyway, in the same way that I've pretended to leave the real key at home. I don't trust fancy electronics that much.

Strangely, however, I do trust the £1,800 radar-operated cruise control which pegs my speed to that of the car in the front and automatically surges me past when he gets out of the way. And I've spent hours choosing precisely how many seconds I want the rear number plate light to stay on after I get out.

To be honest, I didn't want any of these gizmos but the only topaz AMG SL available came with them all fitted. So it was a case of pay up or wait three years for the precise level of trim I wanted. Now, after just a week, the car has to go to hospital because the infernal insurance company is insisting it's fitted with a £750 tracking device. And here's the thing: the dealer hasn't offered to come to pick it up. When my wife's new Lotus was ready for its first service they came all the way from Norfolk. But Mercedes won't even come 10 miles.

That's been my overriding impression of old-man motoring so far. The dealer gave me a couple of bottles of fizz, which was nice, but nobody from Mercedes head office has called to see if I'm happy. And that's not the Big I Am talking. They should do this for everyone.

When you buy a new Rolls-Royce you get 24-hour-a-day access to a man who can get you anything. I have the impression Mercedes wouldn't get off its fat, corporate **** even if one of its customers was drowning. It didn't want to arrange a test drive. It didn't send a brochure even though I rang and asked for one four times. The rules in the brochure about what you can have and what you can't are silly. The choice of colours on offer is hopeless, the choice of trim is even worse, and it forgot to fit the phone.

Plainly to Mercedes this car is just another entry in a profit and loss account, but to me it's the tangible result of countless weekends and late nights in front of a computer screen. I therefore feel ever so slightly cheated.

But hey, I still have an SL 55 parked outside and despite the best efforts of the people who made it I still think it's one of the world's greatest cars. Better than the Ferrari F355 that it replaces? No, not really, but let me put it this way: I don't wince every time I get out of it.

GMW

Nice read. Let's see what he says once his past the 1000miles and has really pushed the throttle.

GMW

BlueSL,

Did you type all that or copy paste?

blueSL

No, I copied from the Sunday Times web-site and pasted it in!