Fast, Stylish, Safe, but Still not the COTY King
Probably the easiest car to eliminate from the 2012 COTY running is the Mercedes-Benz 350 SLK, the most expensive of the 10 cars in the competition.
The Benz isn’t a bad car - if it was it would never have reached the finals - but it is the best part of R750 000. More significant is the fact that it is simply too niche: it is a two-seater convertible with a very sporty nature and historically the competition has favoured all-rounders.
But it is a feel-good car and the growing popularity of hard-topped convertibles (where the steel roof folds electrically into the boot) isn’t hard to understand. You get the best of both worlds with the only real sacrifice being a lack of boot space when the roof is down. Theoretically that’ll seldom matter and when you’re undertaking longer journeys you’d normally have the top up anyway.
There’s lots of advanced technology in the Benz, including some clever safety kit. This includes the Attention Assist drowsiness detection system and Pre-Safe, which prepares the car in a number of ways when an accident has become inevitable. This includes tensioning the seatbelts and it will even autonomously apply the brakes in certain situations.
More prosaic is a feature called Airguide, which enables you to have that wind in your hair feeling, without actually having the wind in your hair. It is simply a cleverly-shaped clear Perspex screen which pivots out from the roll-over hoops and tames turbulent airflow which can often make topless motoring tiresome.
Feel-good factor is influenced by how a car looks and the long nose with brutal frontal styling and grille treatment sets the tone, with the promise of serious performance. The big V6 certainly delivers in that regard and M-B claim a 0 – 100 km/h sprint of just 5,6 seconds and a top speed limited to 250.
Needless to say the engineering and quality is of the highest order, as is the dynamic behaviour, with one rider: While it’ll seldom manifest itself on public roads, I was really disappointed at how aggressively the SLK’s stability and traction control intervened when the driver attacked the corners (this on a ride and handling track during the COTY testing at Gerotek), rapidly putting paid to any fun. The car was also noisier than I thought it should be, though the bellow of the engine was not necessarily an unwelcome companion.
It’ll be interesting to see, come March 14 and the COTY banquet, how many of the judges will have allocated points to the SLK. Each member of the scoring panel has 25 points which the must allocate to a minimum of three vehicles and a maximum of five, with 10 the maximum permissible for any single vehicle. Needless to say, how you divvy up your allocation is critical, this information also becoming common knowledge when the winner is revealed.
I’ve got a feeling that they judges are not going to be kind to the Benz when it comes to handing out points, though that is not ultimately going to be a reflection on the ‘goodness’ of the car.
