None More Groe: Here's The 2013 SL65 AMG

Suck it, proles! While the up-and-coming, emerging-market, cheap-and-cheerful crowd enthuses over the prospect of Datsun’s return or considers the purchase of Daewoo’s Chevrolet’s latest Korean global minicar, the nice people at Mercedes-Benz have decided to cut the one percent (real or imagined) in on the action with an early release of the 2013 SL65 roadster, er, cabriolet, er, whatever the hell it is.

The previous-generation SL65 was a rather one-dimensional creature. Your humble author had the chance to spin a peanut-eyed SL55 and SL65 back-to-back around Autobahn Country Club with Australian stock-car racer and driving-school founder Barry Graham about six years ago, and we both came to the conclusion that the SL55 was actually faster. The big twelve’s calendarian turbo lag and apatosaurian weight wrote an on-track check that its additional 140 or so horsepower over the supercharged V-8 version couldn’t cash. Luckily for fast-Benz fans, the SL63 which arrived afterwards was maybe the most satisfying AMG SL, since it had that wonderful, free-spinning naturally-aspirated AMG-specific V-8.

The new-gen SL63 unceremoniously tosses the six-point-two, I mean, six-point-three V-8 in favor of a twin-turbo 5.5 coupled with a 250-pound weight reduction. For some people, however, that won’t be enough, so Mercedes-Benz will debut an SL65 at New York next month.

The engine is mostly carryover, retuned for 621 horsepower instead of 604. Torque stays the same at 738 pound-feet. This torque figure, which appears all over the big-buck German spec sheets, is significant for two reasons. First, it equates to a round thousand newton-meters. Second, it was widely considered to be all the power the old five-speed Benz automatic could handle. That transmission does not return for 2013, however; instead, a beefed-up 7G-TRONIC will be doing the shifting. It’s a shame, really: the old transmission wasn’t the smoothest thing going, but it was durable.

Weight is down to 4,299 pounds or thereabouts. Price will be in the $200K range. As before, the depreciation curve should run at approximately dead vertical, so if you’re genuinely smitten by the idea of owning a singularly awkward German Corvette that gets seven miles per gallon, waiting two years should enable you to take delivery at half price.