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It’s been a fun monsoon. Motorcycles have been plentiful and as a pleasant side dish, I’ve had a defiantly bright, cheerful car for each of the last three months. Long story short, traction control systems have been duly tortured as tyres contend with rain-soaked roads, and for a change, I’ve been completely dry while facilitating said torture. But what happens when they hand me a convertible, the new SLK, no less?
Now, the SLK happens to be one of the most popular roadsters in the world and is a bit of a trendsetter. For those of you who’ve perhaps forgotten and those who weren’t born then, the SLK invented the party trick vario-roof (methinks it also added the phrase ‘party trick’ to motoring hacks’ vocabularies worldwide), and the sight of it opening and neatly tucking itself away into the boot sent Mercedes-Benz’s competitors scurrying to hammer together their own folding roofs. And after M-B created the folding roof, they set about making more trick stuff around it – the SLK now comes with something called a panoramic roof with Magic Sky Control (sounds like the Japanese came up with that name, eh?) that enables you to turn the roof from transparent to opaque.
Looks-wise, except for the first one (unless I’m missing something here), the SLK has always imitated its biggest sibling at that time. The earlier one looked like the SLR McLaren and the new one is a scaled-down SLS AMG. However, it remains faithful to the SLK silhouette – the long bonnet, two doors and stubby tail end formula never looked this good.
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