This is a quick car. Naught to 100 km/h takes 6.29 seconds, while a roll from 40 to 80 km/h requires only 2.66 seconds. The top speed of 250 km/h is within easy reach too, although the road conditions at the time only allowed us to attain 229 km/h before stepping on the brakes. They’re another highlight – the brakes – massive AMG rotors which shed speed with absolutely no drama and do a quick job of it as well. Eighty km/h to standstill takes a mere two seconds and just under 22 metres! That’s incredible for a 1,610-kg car.
There’s also the plethora of safety systems for this motive dynamite: adaptive anti-lock brakes with force distribution and brake assist, complete with hill start and hold, stability programme, acceleration skid control, Attention Assist, Neckpro head-rests and six airbags, among other electronic nannies. Let’s not forget those massive roll-over bars behind the headrests, which, considering the worst scenario, will protect your noggin, your entire body for that matter, in the rare event that the car hits something and flips over.
Now we get to the imminent topic of fuel efficiency. Yes, it’s a sports car and it has a big five-and-a-half litre eight-pot, but the numbers seriously didn’t disappoint: eight kilometres to the litre on the highway and 5.0 km/l in the city. I know of cars with half or less that displacement, weighing much lesser than this does, which return identical numbers.
Mercedes call the SLK-Class ‘Your closest link with the road’, and we agree. There are few other cars which let you connect with the drive as engagingly as an AMG does, and when it’s an AMG roadster, it’s all the more enticing. For that big naturally aspirated V8, all those horses and the sheer bliss of open-top motoring, complete with the assurance that it’s an offering from one of the best brands in the world, the AMG SLK has few equals, nay, rivals.
