Mercedes-Benz SLK230 | Shed of the Week
The SLK once boasted a two-year wait list. Now you can have one for a fiver less than a bag...
Where do you stand on rust? Obviously it's best not to stand on it at all, but what's your view on it? Would the sight of corrosion on a car that you were thinking of buying instantly disqualify it from your shortlist?
For some, it mainly depends on whether it's in sight. A bit like Mrs Shed at a wedding reception, if you can't see a bad thing you can almost forget it's there. With the right beverages to hand, you can even convince yourself that there is no bad thing.
Of course, refusing to acknowledge the certainty of rust on a car that you know is famously prone to it is like whistling a merry tune and looking the other way while someone wees on your garden fence. It's a simmering threat that you know will eventually explode rudely into your life when the MOT test comes round. It's just a matter of time. That's when you kick yourself for not sorting it out, or at least for not flogging it off in time to some other delusional fool.
Which is what seems to have happened here with this Mercedes SLK230 Kompressor. To give the dealer his due, he has made no attempt to disguise the all too visible problem on the nearside wheel arch. There may well be matching rust on the offside wing but Shed's computer screen is heaving with too much grime to make that out.
Shed himself is quite relaxed about rust. Like the SLK230, his own 25-year-old Merc has a rusty nearside wing. 1990s Mercs were made of thick lumps of proper metal, so every year or so all Shed has to do is key the heavy duty wire brush into his drill to buzz off the top layer of brown and reveal more pristine metal beneath. A quick daub of primer and a squirt of Hycote later and he's all set for another year of deeply satisfying old-school Germanic motoring. Plus he's progressively lightening the car as he goes along, adding performance.
As we all know, something went badly wrong with Mercedes metal at the turn of the century, so Shed can't guarantee that a slip of the drill while employing the same technique on this SLK wouldn't make its entire front end fall off. He wouldn't be doing that with this car though. At £995 he'd simply be getting out his old orange Black & Decker sander before thinking better of it and settling for a few strokes with a blue marker pen from WH Smiths.
Rust does also attack the boot lids and undersides of these SLKs. It would be funny to see if this car has a full M-B service history because if it did you should technically be able to claim under the company's 30 year corrosion warranty. Good luck with that.
What else? The four-pot engine is pretty gruff at the best of times, though you do get a supercharger which is always cool. The 722.6 auto gearbox is better than the manual and was meant to be sealed for life, and so it could be as long as you didn't mind the trans fluid looking like brown Windsor soup after 40,000 miles. Throttle bodies get dirty and the K40 relay module is famous for dodgy soldering, causing the engine to die and not restart and (Shed seems to recall) also leading to problems with the electric roof. The driver's side window might not seal properly and the drain holes on either side of the back bumper need to be kept clear unless you think it's a good idea to carry gallons of water around in the back of a rear-drive car. Actually, that does sound like a good idea.
You might be surprised to hear that Mercedes is still selling the SLK, or the SLC as it was renamed in 2016 in order to tie it more closely into the C-Class range. (SLK originally stood for sportlich, leicht and kurz, and the abbreviation sounded better than Sporty Light Short.) The gen-three R172 was officially discontinued last year but it still appears as a new car to buy on M-B UK's website, albeit with eight grand knocked off the £37,000 retail price of the SLC 200 Final Edition cars that British dealers are now desperately trying to shift.
That's a sad exit for a Bremen-built car that had a two-year waiting list on its launch in 1996. Nevertheless, 24 years and still limping along after a fashion is a good innings for any car in the modern era. Mercedes' own X-Class pickup has just been ignominiously canned after only three years on account of nobody buying them. The roadster's longevity is a testament to the rightness of the original Bruno Sacco design and to the public's willingness to buy Mercs that they perceive to be stylish.
We aren't given any shots of the inside of this one, which is a pity, but judging by the rest of the car and the reasonable 130,000 mileage you'd not be expecting anything too horrific. Advisories on the recently done MOT included worn rear tyres, a bit of front wheel bearing play and some moisture in one of the lights, again totally normal for the SLK.
One of the most popular questions people Google about the SLKs is 'is it a man's car?'. You'll have your own answer to that, but less than a thousand pounds for a steel-top convertible with 195hp, a 7.3sec 0-62mph time and a 147mph top end doesn't seem so bad. As regards running costs, they'll be 30mpg, £330 tax, group 34 insurance, and a felt tip pen for under a quid.
Poor chassis? You haven’t got a clue.
Poor build? There are still lots of them driving around.
I love Z3s for just how bad they are. Most of them were pretty gutless 1.9 4 cylinder jobs (maybe even with a 4 speed auto!) so they couldn't expose the shortcomings of the chassis so much, but the 2.8 and 3.0 were brilliant fun in that way that overpowered cars with inadequate suspension are. They gave them nice soft springs so you could get maximum camber changes at the rear when the car shifted around during anything other than sedate driving, perhaps just as you came out of a corner and wanted to get back on the power for real "oh s
t" fun times.I had one of each and they were at times very exciting. In that regard they captured the feel of a rubbish British roadster that might fling you off into a hedge if you're not paying attention in the way that the MX5 never did.
No, they are not as good as a well developed multi-link, but they are better than a lot of supposedly superior stuff out there, probably because they were developed for so long and the tuning was well understood.
Both the Z3 and the SLK get a lot of criticism for their chassis performance, but I personally don’t think it’s warranted.
No, they are not as good as a well developed multi-link, but they are better than a lot of supposedly superior stuff out there, probably because they were developed for so long and the tuning was well understood.
Both the Z3 and the SLK get a lot of criticism for their chassis performance, but I personally don’t think it’s warranted.
I certainly can't think of any sports cars with double wishbones or a multilink setup at the back that has anything like the poor behaviour of the semi trailing arms of the Z3 and E30 as you approach the limit, although I only know the S2000 by reputation.
The Z3 forums were full of people banging on about how it could be "cured" with much stiffer springs, dampers, and anti roll bars. Well yes, if you stop the suspension moving up and down then the wheel geometry won't alter so much, but now it feels like it has wooden wheels mounted directly to the car and it jumps all over the road on bad surfaces.
In the context of the time it wasn't the foulest handling car by a long way, but given how expensive the car was it was disappointing that the E36, out at the same time as the Z3 but the less "sporting" car, had a rear suspension system that could combine good ride with consistently good and benign handling (and better NVH). As did the Mazda MX5 for 2/3rds of the price.
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