I’ve never been one to slag off a car for having a four-cylinder engine or even a three-pot, but a Mercedes SL isn’t just any car. It’s the S-Class of sports cars, a car that once wholly embodied Mercedes’ racing ethos. And in something like that, a four-cylinder doesn’t work.
The 2.0-liter turbocharged four-cylinder has an electric turbocharger to mitigate lag and a 48-volt mild-hybrid system for an extra dose of torque. Its on-paper figures of 375 hp and 354 lb-ft seem fine, too, and with peak power at 6,750 rpm and torque between 3,250 and 5,000 rpm, it seems like a car that’ll be happy to rev out to reward the driver.
But it feels limp.
Perhaps the direct comparison to a 416-hp/369-lb-ft Mercedes-AMG A45 S hyper-hatch ahead of me left me wanting, but for a car entirely developed by AMG to have weaker performance than a run-of-the-mill hatch tuned by the department is a big problem.
It revs out fine, picks up speed decently, and the nine-speed automatic gearbox does a fair job of being in the right gear at the right time. But the engine feels flat, lacks character as it revs out, and because it doesn’t have the DCT of the A 45 and CLA 45, it doesn’t give off the same flatulent upshifts.