2009 Mercedes-Benz SL63 AMG - Jay Leno's Garage

welcome to another episode of Jays garage this week we're going to be Road testing the 2009 6.3 SL AMG if you're not familiar with AMG they are the performance arm of mercedes-benz they were an outside tuner that got absorbed by mercedes-benz all through the 60s and 70s all the high-performance stuff was AMG they're just wonderful wonderful engineers and their race car guys and they've taken that technology and brought it to the SL the SL is not primarily a sports car it was a luxury car a luxury two-seater car and now with the advent of AMG it has real sporting pretensions and it's actually quite fast this is zero to sixty and four and a half seconds it's a little chubby it's about 4,300 pounds which is pretty heavy but it has itself well you know kind of like a big woman that can square dance you know it just sort of gets around the floor pretty good the reason for all that weight of course is the convertible roof and we'll get into all of that later but with 518 horsepower and over 600 foot-pounds of torque it gets out of its own way pretty good it's got a 7-speed automatic transmission 7-speed double clutch no torque converter that seems to be the way to go these days a couple weeks ago we did the Porsche with the with their dual clutch transmission and torque converter seemed to be on the way out and this seems to be the wave of the future these new seven speeds let's walk around the car I should say it's a great looking car massive brakes all the way around every luxury and Emilee you can think of I don't need all that luxury stuff I wish AMG would make a manual 6-speed gearbox that's it please AMG please do that but in lieu of that this is a really good transmission people is to marvel at the 59 Ford retractable remember the metal roof and all the relays and wires and it was an unbelievable thing to watch and of course this is well this is like the great-great-grandson of that mercedes don't like that but okay take a look at how it works first the windows goes down all done automatically feels like that what's that Buffy oh you don't like the wind buffeting oh no problem I can fix that anyway this will keep Buffy's hair in place on the way to prep school you can gotta air-conditioned headrest there are fans behind the headrests here that blow cool air onto your neck yeah I know you've got four different levels of performance and transmission a Comfort Sport Sport+ and full manual is Comfort when you've got Buffy in the car when you're by yourself and you want to go crazy go to sports plus and then of course manual which the gearbox stays in a manual mode and you shift it using the paddle shifters it's pretty amazing technology as you know I tend to be more of an old-school guy and I to me lighter is better but that's okay if you would have told me a few years ago the 4,300 pound car can handle this well and be this fast I would have been astounded let's take a look under the hood okay as you probably know this a normally aspirated engine replaces the SL 5.5 liter that was supercharged the supercharger might have had a bit more torque but this revs a lot freer boy this sounds like a Grand Prix engine it's amazing how quickly a normally aspirated engine can rev up without the weight of a supercharger to drive it as I said 518 horsepower at 6,800 rpm its 465 foot-pounds of torque this new transmission also has a rates a race start function once you select sport plus place your left foot on the brake pedal reference rattle then it decides the optimum engine speed for takeoff before you launch the car yeah I know it's kind of a lazy man's thing but well it's a lot of fun when that punk pulls up next year in the Mustang see once the who falls into the trunk and then when you open the trunk the roof lifts up so you can put actually you get a couple of things in there small children something you press that button there and you press that button there and this way you don't throw your arm out doing this ah I would make the whole car out of carbon fiber throw the roof away get rid of all that stuff and just make the fastest SL in the world but that's me you know going back to the 190 SL the Mercedes two-seaters have always been more luxury oriented and sporty this is a pretty good compromise of luxury GT car and sports car all-in-one I mean it can do any of those feats pretty well you know it's about as fast as a standard Corvette when let's take it for a ride puppy muffin I'll see you at prep school late Mercedes Benz invented a whole new class of car when they come out with the SL back in the 50s and 60s it was a luxury touring two-seater you know most sports cars at the time were pretty crude no roll up windows whereas these were something that an adult would drive you know the 190 very underrated car terrific car costs a 300 SL Briana shall we but the SL roadster they got kind of soft then when AMG got involved they turned it into a more hardcore sportscar well a hard car for SL you know it's a testament to the receive engineers that a car this heavy can handle as well as it does I was a little surprised when I read the forty-three hundred pound curve wave but as I said before you've got that Mercedes safety issue you know even got the probably the safest car in the world you've got air bags everywhere sign all over the place and it's a very very comfortable car that's amazing what you can do with electronics these days steering is nicely weighted as I said that normally aspirated engine boy just quickly I have a wonderful exhaust and you can shove my hand as well can we get that way or using the paddle shifters here left side for down here blimp each time you downshift and then you've got this screen right behind my head here that you can put up to take out the effect of any wind buffeting I used to work for Mercedes Benz when I was a kid I did new car prep and I was always impressed at the level of workmanship in the cars you know most American cars late 60s the only 70s but not very well put together Mercedes AHS mercedes-benz always had an incredible build quality their big slogan was why would anyone make $10,000 for a car which seems pretty crazy in those days if I was fourteen thousand and twenty thousand there are a lot of bargains now they seem like a bargain now not when you're making a bucket of water unless you're a race car driver unless you're out on the track this car can do just about anything any other contemporary sport cigars one nice thing about Mercedes like these s l's is why they hold their value these have such a wonderful reputation especially the AMG you know I just bought an old 6.3 Mercedes a 1969 with 324 thousand miles on it and to look at it and drive it you'd think it was 60,000 miles that's the one thing about mercedes-benz the quality lasts a long long time I always laugh when people say I want to get rid of my Benz it's got 80,000 miles on it I tell them you know that's barely broken in but we here in America we still have this thing in the back of our minds at 80,000 on a thousand miles is the end of a cars life it used to be but it's not anymore not with something like this you know with a speed limit of 155 miles an hour you can rack up 100,000 miles pretty quick the great Mercedes safety feature if the car gets a little out of line I think she's going to flip or in some critical driving situation the rollbar will automatically employ see if we get the roll bar to go up our sense of doing something stupid pretty good technology it's amazing how someone gets perceived as a luxury car can actually out handle some of the best sports cars of the last decade or so if you want a car that does everything well pretty good choice comfortable fast smooth incredibly safe like me a few pounds overweight but that's okay let's see if it'll do a Burnout that's the most important thing Wow it even does burnouts see you next week

Channel: Jay Leno's Garage

Views: 478,871

Rating: 4.8984351 out of 5

Keywords: Jay Leno, Automotive, Cars, Garage, horsepower, Jay, Leno, mods, custom car, Speed, Fast, modded cars, mechanic, fastest car, Jay Leno's Garage, cars, exotic cars, interview, custom, Leno car, funny, Leno funny, car show, Rare, Motorcycles, racing, jay leno interview, auto, drive, power, fast, amazing, cool, the cars, vehicle, 2009 Mercedes-Benz SL63 AMG, mercedes

Id: aRm82yJx4zc

Length: 9min 57sec (597 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 23 2013