For much more than 20 years, the people in Stuttgart designed sporty roadsters primarily based on the C-Course chassis, lastly killing off the SLC all through the 2020 design year. The to start with of individuals vehicles to get there on our shores was the SLK 230, which debuted in this article as a 1998 design. Its retractable hardtop founded a craze for convertibles that only not long ago has ended as their complexity and bodyweight (not to mention extensive-time period upkeep) weren’t truly worth regardless of what gains they possessed more than increasingly enhanced cloth roofs. Approximately a quarter-century later on, this is just one of people ’98s, photographed in a San Francisco Bay Area self-service garden.
For 2001, the SLK 320 and its V6 motor grew to become accessible right here, but the U.S.-sector SLKs for 1998-2000 were being all 230s.
This 2.3-liter supercharged inline-4 designed 190 horsepower, which is about what the 6-cylinder BMW Z3 created. You could get this car with a guide transmission, but this one particular (like practically all U.S.-industry SLKs) has the automatic.
These engines are much easier to discover now than when I wrote the definitive tutorial to low-cost junkyard superchargers, so I am going to have to have to pull a person and discover its techniques.
These purple-and-black leather-based seats are quite snazzy.
Later on on, DaimlerChrysler utilized this car as the foundation for the Chrysler Crossfire, which was readily available for the 2004-2008 model several years (right after the SLK had gone to a new platform).
Peter Pan reveals up with a new SLK and you can fly all over again!