How expensive was it to own a Mercedes SL 55 AMG?

[Music] [Applause] today I'm trying something new first off I'm doing a video in English and second I'm reviewing my own car this 2002 Mercedes SL 55 has been my own car for two years and I've decided it's about time to sell it now because I'm a car guy and I want something else and in the same moment I think it would be interesting to tell the app all the costs I've had in this car and do like a little total cost of ownership calculation so I will we will start the video with me driving around and reviewing the car and at the end we will come back back here and I will basically show you a list of all the items I've had with the car all the expenses how much it cost me to run it and in general talk a bit about car ownership in Switzerland so thank you and enjoy [Music] [Applause] so why did I buy this car well on the one hand I really like convertibles even though I shouldn't because people with no hair cannot stay out in the Sun without wearing a hat this is why I had a stupid hat in the car that I will not show you also I had the previous generation Mercedes SL the r129 which is a really lovely car but for my use it was a bit too old-fashioned meaning it had really indirect steering and even worse for me the seating position was quite cramped whereas in this car for a person of my height I'm 1 meter 84 it's really comfortable speaking of comfort the sl's aren't usually really that sporty of sports car they are more like you know luxury cruisers with some power and I think this come makes no exception the ride is really good but still hard so it's not like for example an s-class where the ride is really smooth this is more hard you're more connected to the road but it's still more comfortable than you would expect from a sports car this all comes from the in famous ABC suspension that this car has a system called active body control and what is this basically it's a hydropneumatic suspension that's very similar to what Citroen uses in their cars in fact this car can be raised and lowered by I think about six centimeters on the push of this button which is very handy since it is a relatively low car and if you go up a curb or something like that you can raise the car great I use it all the time I actually have to use it to get out of my garage without doing any damage the ABC system is in famous because when it fails it's really really expensive to fix this is why some people have opted to convert the car through normal struts doing that I think the car loses a lot of Appeal because the good part of the ABC system it's actually a really advanced active suspension system that eliminates the yaw and that actually works really well you can even put it in a sporty mode where it does it a lot harder but basically this is a relatively comfortable car that doesn't you're speaking of expensive maintenance this car when it came out in 2002 it had the world's first electronic brakes a system called SBC the sensotronic brake control which means the brake pedal is not physically connected to the brakes it all happens through a pump and electronics which means whenever this pump fails and it will fail because the pump has a certain number of activations it allows and once that is reached it will basically put the message on the display saying okay breaks service needed and then you have to replace the pump the pump can not be recognition it could be reset it but if you reset it it might fail at some point so that's an expensive maintenance item that needs to be handled at some point needs to be tackled at some point the brakes while being electronic they still deliver a really really good pedal feel and they are very nice and module it's they're really good brakes this being an older Mercedes everything is operated by vacuum meaning the central locking system it works by vacuum the trunk lock works by vacuum the locks for these East boxes and cubby holes and stuff work by vacuum so if you have a vacuum leak somewhere in your system your doors won't close anymore whereas basically every other manufacturer used electric motors Mercedes relied on vacuum I mean it can work well but when it goes wrong it's a bit of a pig to throw it out the issues another part of the appeal of this car is the folding metal roof meaning when you close the roof it's pretty much like a coupe pane so you get less noise than you would in a normal convertible and I think the car really looks good when it's closed which is also not very usual for a convertible car speaking about looks I think this generation SL is the last of the prettier cells up until that point Mercedes s else have been really really pretty cars but then already when they facelifted this made it square up front while remaining round at the back it kind of created an imbalance and at some point with the next generation they actually managed to do a car that's actually ugly so yeah there is a point to speak for this car but of course it was designed by an Italian legendary Mercedes designer Bruno Sacco which in Italian literally means brown bag still a very very good designer if you ask me and he did some really timeless designs for Mercedes Benz another reason why I bought this car of course was the AMG engine this car being an SL 55 has a 5.4 liter v8 engine with a supercharger it produces 500 horsepower you could drive this car quite swiftly without ever going over 3,000 revs but even if you go over 3,000 revs the engine keeps on delivering it's actually really nice because it's a rather large engine that still manages to Rev manage to be fun at high revs [Applause] plus it sounds really good handling wise the car handles well but it is a heavy car it's almost two tons and you feel it when you drive it I mean it doesn't give you the feeling of being light and nimble it gives you the feeling of being like heavy but at the same time the car can handle really nice but it's not necessarily instilling you the confidence to drive it at the limit another thing that also in my opinion limits drivability is that this car does not have a limited slip differential because I mean only Mercedes Benz can think it's a good idea to build a 500 horsepower car and not equip it with a limited slip differential that's insane I mean sure the car is a SP and the ASR and all sorts of traction control gadget Reed which means it will probably not spin out in this car if you don't drive it like a fool but also when it's rainy when it's slippery when even in the middle of a corner on a dry day the car has traveled putting the power down so the electronics will cut the power and you will not drive as fast or as well as you would actually like the sl55 when it came out it was the first mercedes road car with like shifting buttons or pedals or whatever you want to call those on the steering wheel to change gears for the automatic transmission and it's funny because this is so common nowadays but back then it was such a novelty that they actually had to put these like plus and minus signs on the steering wheel to show people like ooh here you can you can go into higher gear here you can go to a lower gear so like Wow and it works okay if you drive like a curvy road like I'm doing now it's good you can pre-select your gear and it will hold that gear until the rev limiter then it will automatically shift but basically it's basically meant for press l acting your gear rather than for doing quick shifting because it doesn't shift quickly I mean if I shift now now with the gears changed so yeah there's a lot of delay you shouldn't like use it like a dual clutch transmission or maybe like a modern automatic transmission but it's still workable for pre-selecting the gear I know there's a tight corner I shift down and then the gear is ready I can do the corner lose some traction and then shift up the funny thing is if you want to use the buttons on the steering wheel to change the gears you basically have to put it into manual mode because if you're on automatic mode like I now the buttons do nothing you have to go to winter then to manual mode and then you can shift gears manually again this is an old car and this is basically where it mostly shows but I think for the type of car it's ok because most of the time the automatic transmission it's a five-speed will do a really really good job the normal driving you'll almost never drive with the buttons and when you drive on a nice curvy road like I am they work fine it's just it's not suited for maximum attack and because in general this is not a maximum attack kind of car this is car you drive more leisurely you enjoy the sound you enjoy the power you just have a good time and I think in this regard the car is very very capable as a matter of fact this is in general a very very capable car because in the two years that I've owned it I basically used it as a daily driver in the summer I wouldn't want to drive this car in the winter because of the problems I mentioned before with the traction as slow as soon as it's slippery as soon as it's icy the car has serious serious traction issues and in Switzerland you know winters can be a bit harsher than maybe in Southern California on the other hand if it didn't have these traction problems I think this would be a really really good winter car because actually like all Mercedes convertibles it has a really really really good heating system meaning it heats really quickly and really well which is of course needed if you have a convertible because you might want to drive it with the roof open even when the weather is not that great and due to the good heating system due to the good heated seats a Mercedes SL is actually a convertible you can drive with the roof open if you close the windows like I do now even when it's like 10 degrees outside Celsius again this I think is a very very competent car not only is it like fun to drive enjoying the Sun enjoying the weather the sound of the engine but also you go on the motorway and close the roof and it becomes a very very capable long-distance Cruiser I've been to Italy twice with it driven like a thousand two hundred kilometres a day and it's been really good well except that in on both trips the car had to come back on a flatbed but that's a different story that I'm gonna tell later on it's in general it's a really really nice car I think also the interior it looks very nice it's made with nice material it's a leather and well probably leatherette on the lower part and for a 16 year old car I think it held up well what didn't hold up so well of course is the infotainment system I mean yeah it's a CD based navigation system and the last net update I think is from 2010 so it's pretty much useless I usually just use my phone for navigation much better the sl55 also comes with the AMG sports seats which are like really really comfortable seats they actually hug you in the right places they hold you in well and they are you know adjustable in every way imaginable what's also nice they are cooled they are heated and they have the massage function even though I have to say the massage function not great especially if you driven one of the more recent Mercedes like for example and a recently class with the AMG seats those seats have amazing massages anyway it has it's better than nothing and of course all the massage is vacuum operated so it's operated by the same pump that operates the central locking system and the boots pick down this car since I bought it very used at the time I bought it it was already 14 years old as you might imagine is not completely standard in fact it has a different exhaust of a brand called roar which I've personally never heard and I think it sounds ok ish I mean I know how the normal 55 AMG sounds and that car sounds awesome and I think this car with this exhaust sounds a bit worse so the previous owner I don't know what he was after but I think he made it worse than it would have been Factory also this car comes with 19-inch BRABUS wheels which I think are really nice certainly nicer than the 18-inch wheels they would have come on of course I also had to do a few modifications to the car among which the first that it was I installed a comfort module for the roof meaning you can open and close the roof while you're in motion and I think this is absolutely critical for one of these convertibles that you can like close the roof or open it when you're not completely stationary because imagine it you're at the traffic stop it's right you think okay I'm gonna open the roof and then it turns green what do you do you have to either interrupt the process which you can't because it has to either close again or open again or you have to keep standing at a green light until your roof is open which everybody pees on behind you will hate whereas with a module like this you can slowly drive away while the roof keeps opening you're good to go when you stand when it's close to you accelerate on you're gone another modification I did I added a dancing gateway 500 which is basically an mp3 player that you can connect to the entertainment system and it's really good I mean it doesn't display titles but it can play thousands of songs you can have hundreds of folders you just have to be really organized and you know have it alphabetically because otherwise you will never find a song but I think that makes it so much more usable because nowadays if you have a car without Bluetooth without mp3 capping the capability it's not really great this is L used to come with a Nokia cell phone so it actually has the Nokia 6210 cell phone that you can put into a holder here thankfully there's a company called VCO they make Brutus adapters that fit into those Nokia 6210 cradles and then you can connect your smartphone via bluetooth to it and use the cars inbuilt hands-free phone which is really good thing makes again an old car like this usable with modern devices [Music] [Applause] now let's talk about costs what has this car cost me in the two years of ownership that I've had and like any proper Connard I prepared a spreadsheet I bought this car in 2016 for 20,000 Swiss francs which was a good price back then but I got it at such a good price because the roof did not open and I figured out immediately it was the guides for the little flaps that closed on the tunnel cover and this is a common problem you can buy them from mercedes-benz they had an improved version now it cost like 80 Swiss francs to do so okay but this was also the first thing I did after I bought the car I bought those roof rails actually they cost 71 francs and 28 cents I did actually another thing that it immediately after buying it I removed the automatic shifter and removed the shifter lock because mercedes-benz of this vintage this shifter the shifter lock that prevents you from changing into into gear on to neutral when the car is locked it's made out of plastic and it breaks and when it breaks you won't get the car out of park anyway so since mine was starting to break a head to wrestle the car out of park I decided to remove it immediately in order not to remain stranded I then later on I bought a replacement lock one made out of metal and installed that that shifter lock cost me fifty two francs because I installed it myself and it was a pig and I did it twice but anyway now it's perfect shifter lock is in it the car is alright the way it should be and it's made of metal should never break again then I bought the engine gateway 500 the mp3 player for the entertainment system that was 272 I bought the Comfort module for the roof to allow it to open and close while in motion that was 250 Swiss francs also this is alright after buying the car one of the side covers on the side of the rear windshield was had a crack in it so I replaced that that was 102 Swiss francs in September of that same year I had to buy new tires because when I bought the car it came with tires that were like not in great condition but you know in at the beginning of August I looked at them and said yeah you know I'm going on holidays with rolls and then when I come back I'll replace them yeah turns out I should have replaced them before because while I was driving back from Italy tire blew on the motorway nothing happened I parked a car on the side of the road everything was good but I had to drive home in a rental car because of course it was a Sunday and two hundred and seventy five millimeter tires were not available and yeah I had to work the next day so the car came back on the trail about four weeks later and I bought a new set of tires good Brit shown as stubborn as 0:01 cost me a thousand francs fitted everything yeah that's what it is what I did also as a preventative maintenance this car's ABC system I was pretty sure it had not been maintained so I actually flat flashed all the hydraulic liquid and installed a new filter that it was a DIY job it was very easy took me about half an hour of anything and also it cost me like just the cost for the filter the ABC filters 55 Swiss francs and the hydraulic oil I paid 135 francs for it because I bought 12 litres because I thought I needed 12 litres but in reality I basically needed seven or eight litres so I still have a bit the spare oil maybe I'll do another flush I don't know and I also bought some random clips for like 8 francs to hold like trimmings in the trunk and in August 2016 I did an a/c service because my air conditioning wasn't blowing cold anymore so it needed a refill and like a valve replaced that was 226 Swiss francs I upgraded the number plate lights to LEDs because they were cracked anyway I need a new one so I got the LEDs which are legal they have the e sign and stuff they cost me twenty-six Swiss francs then in July 2017 I did a large service Mercedes calls it the service assist ah which is like the daddy where you change your spark plugs and oil and everything that was also we found that one cracking arm actually was worn out so we replaced that and all in all it cost me two thousand and twenty seven Swiss francs then I went again on holidays in Italy with the car and on the way back again I had to break down by the side of the road because the car turned off while driving so the engine just shut off while I was on the motorway I just coasted into an emergency Bay and then basically the car wouldn't restart it was again I got there I got a rental car drove home with it and then the car came back on a trailer like four weeks later turns out the supercharger clutch had failed supercharger itself was fine but the clutch that engages in disengages the supercharger had broken it basically had shorted whatever it did and the part problem is even if I disconnected a supercharger clutch the moment the ECU gives the signal to engage the clutch the motor would stall so the car was not drivable and it needed a new supercharger clutch but mercedes-benz does not sell the supercharger clutch separately meaning you have to buy an entire supercharger entire supercharged mercedes-benz is 6,000 Swiss francs and since I was not going to spend 6,000 Swiss francs to replace a clutch I bought a used supercharger that cost me a thousand Swiss francs delivered and then installation and troubleshooting and various thing added another 2000 Swiss francs on top so all in all that failure cost me around 3000 francs okay but basically that was the last maintenance item that I've had since so far the call is good but in total these maintenance costs have added up to seven thousand five hundred and twenty three Swiss francs which over the period of slightly more than two years is actually a lot however these are not they're expensive parts of owning this car that comes when you look at your fixed costs like insurance here in Switzerland insurance is pretty expensive especially if you're a foreigner and the man because you get discriminated against yeah because you're probably also more likely to crash but anyway I pay insurance right now about 2,900 Swiss francs a year however that is for two cars on one number plate because in Switzerland you can have two cars on one number plate meaning you switch number place over to the car you are driving and I'm pretty sure the car relevant for the insurance is the other one and not this one therefore the insurance costs I don't know how to split it up because if I were just to put all the insurance costs on this car this car would have cost me in this two years and a few days it would have cost me six thousand three hundred twenty four francs in insurance Rotex row taxes are really important and fun bit in Switzerland if you have two cars on one number plate you pay the rope tax for the more expensive car in this case it's this one because road tax in the canton of Zurich where I live is calculated based on cubic displacement and weight and this car being 5.4 liters and ping almost two tons it's gonna be expensive in fact I pay one thousand two hundred and ninety eight francs a year of Rotex for this car that gives me fixed costs of nine thousand one hundred and forty seven francs then there's another fun part fuel this car uses regular unleaded fuel I mean regular unleaded in in Switzerland is 95 octane thankfully because it's even and the the super unleaded which is 98 octane anyway in the time I've had it I've done twenty three thousand five hundred and seventy one kilometers and I've used three thousand six hundred and eighty two liters of fuel averaging 15.6 liters on 100 kilometers and a total of five thousand and seven hundred francs in fuel and by the way I know these fuel figures because I actually log every refueling that I do into German side culture plate money today where you can basically track the fuel consumption of your car I know it's a geeky thing to do but I really like to know what my car really really really consumes anyway if we add all these costs together the cost of ownership of this car so far in these 794 days that I've owned it are twenty two thousand three hundred and seventy francs now if we want to do total cost of ownership of the car I have to factor in the sale price I reckon I can sell this car for pretty much the same price I paid two years ago so if I managed to sell the car for twenty thousand francs that means my total cost of ownership is actually the same as the cost of ownership and that makes some fun figures it means we basically the car it will cost me eighty nine cents per kilometres driven or 10,000 284 francs a year or 857 francs a month 197 francs a week 28 francs a day so you get it owning a car is expensive owning an old Mercedes more expensive than other cars and so I get to the point of these cheap luxury cars that used to be very expensive and have devalued a lot they might be really affordable to buy but the maintenance of the cars has not gotten cheaper if anything it's probably gotten more expensive because as the cars become older more stuff will fail and you'll have to repair it so as long as you keep that in mind I think a car like this can still be great value and let me explain you why this car were new it costs two hundred and twenty five thousand francs I bought it 14 years later for twenty thousand francs meaning this car at that point had devalued over 90% of its value and whoever had to basically pay for that devaluation the previous owners they lost a lot more money than I did and it's not just these cars I mean this car was expensive to own for me but if I had gotten like a new Golf GTI for example like something found but new with warranty and everything even that car new it's like fifty thousand francs and then two years later you'll easily have lost twenty thousand francs in devaluation so devaluation alone on a new car is gonna cost as much as everything cost me to to own this car and even our new car you have to pay for fuel you have to sometime pay for service even though often you have free servicing but they have you pay oil and stuff like that you still have to insure it so it's not exactly free to own other than the purchase price so it's always a question of should you buy a car like that depends if you want to cheap reliable car don't but if you want something that's special something that's a bit more fun while still on some sort of a budget a car like this is not that because compared to a new car you don't have the evaluation so all you have are really your running costs and servicing with the thing and from that perspective you can write 500 horsepower v8 supercharged cars for like 10 grand a year all in which in my book is not too bad because I reckon even a Prius if you buy like an old Prius if it's if nothing ever breaks I mean it's a Toyota and all in all with the same mileage nighted it would have cost me like three and a half thousand francs a year so considerably cheaper than this car but also at Prius so yeah I'm not doing this vide to this on Mercedes or whatever I really like the cars I've owned too and I just have to figures I'm a nerd I write stuff down and I wanted to share it with you and yeah let me know if this was interesting for you if you want maybe some more experience of car ownership in Switzerland and thank you for watching [Music] you

Channel: Swiss Car Guy

Views: 359,179

Keywords: Mercedes SL55, SL55 AMG, AMG, SL 55, Mercedes AMG, R230, M113ML, Supercharged, V8, Dension Gateway 500, Brabus, Mercedes-Benz, Sportscar, Car, Cost of ownership, TCO, running costs, how expensive is a mercedes, fuel consumption, Money pit, maintenance cost, mercedes, mercedes are money pits, Ownership experience, should i buy a mercedes, why not to buy expensive cars, cost of mercedes, mercedes problems, mercedes car review, mercedes ownership, supercharger failure, convertible

Id: y_2zO28d6Yg

Length: 33min 38sec (2018 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 14 2018