tommallett

Last weekend I spent some time with the current Mercedes SLK 55 AMG, a car that we at Autoviva should like a lot. All the ingredients are there with a 5.5 litre V8 shoe-horned into a small roadster and a 7-speed AMG gearbox to pour 416bhp through the rear wheels. The big question is: does it work?

Mercedes has a reputation for putting great sounding V8 engines into improbable cars that combine usability with a dose of naughty hot-rod character, and the German manufacturer has tried the same recipe with this latest model. However, it has also tried to compete with the latest Porsche Boxter by adding some focus to the chassis. In doing so it has ended up with a car that is confused, doing neither job particularly well, and losing its selling point in the process.

Let’s start off with some of the good bits first though, because there are some areas where the latest car has moved forward.

The engine is a beauty, it sounds brilliant and it is incredibly tractable, and although there are seven gears you don’t really need them all in normal driving – the preferred method of driving being to waft forward on a wave to torque and horsepower. The throttle response is linear too, with power coming all the way through the rev range all the way to the red line which is set at a relatively heady 7200 rpm.

It is also worth congratulating Mercedes Benz and its tuning arm, AMG, for its attention to detail with this new engine. A 5.5 litre V8 may not sound like it is in tune with the times but AMG has installed a number of different systems including the now obligatory start/stop system and a system that shuts off four cylinders in town driving. It all works pretty well, being relatively unobtrusive and meaning that I saw a not entirely disgraceful 27.2 mpg.

I also liked the interior revisions. I’m not going to rehash the disappointing interiors that Mercedes came up with during the early 2000’s but the company has really turned a corner now. The circular interior air vents look great and the materials now feel both solid and tactile.

So, where does it all go wrong?

It was not long ago that the Mercedes 7G gearbox was up there with the best, but today ZF’s 8-speed automatic and the plethora of double clutch units that inhabit our cars have made the Mercedes unit seem slow witted and a little jerky. Even with the AMG tuning this one in no different, and although the comparison is difficult it seems to work less well with the revisions than the standard one does in a normal 350CDI engine saloon.

However, the killer blow comes where the chassis is concerned.

Whoever signed off the dynamics of the SLK55 AMG mush have had a split personality of sorts. The front end of the car has the typical Mercedes quality of a slight numbness through the steering and a front end that damps intrusions from the road. Where it gets confusing is with the rear axle of the car. You sit right over it and this means that every bump and jolt, something which the BMW Z4 does as well.

The issue is that the front and the rear end operate with such different characters, with the front end gliding and providing little feedback while the rear skips around, that the SLK55 never seems to really know what it wants to be.

Personally I’d be happy for it to be a slightly numb hot rod with a great interior and a fabulous engine, but it doesn’t quite manage that sadly, and there are a number of better conceived options at a little under 60,000 pounds.