The clue was there of course, its gullwing doors flamboyantly aloft, that long bonnet stretching far into the distance. The Mercedes SLS AMG was only months old when in October 2010 a new photo sharing app was launched. We didn't know that a decade down the road around an eighth of the global population would be Instagram users, and nor could we have guessed that the platform would not only influence the culture for a generation of young people, but come to define it.
And who could possibly have known that Mercedes-Benz - which at the time was known for its elegant saloon cars with gunsight three-pointed stars on their prow, ruched beige leather and walnut trim inside - would one day become an automotive darling of the Instagram generation?
Now we see that three-pointed star not as a flying emblem mounted aloft, but more often bigger, more prominent, pressed boldly into the centre of the grille and repeated tens of millions of times in little digital boxes on our phones. Mercedes-Benz is all over Instagram. It's splashed across social media like an MP's sex scandal across the red-tops, seemingly the most coveted premium car brand among millennials and Generation Z-ers around the world.
But is it? I did a spot of research to try and back that statement up. As it happens, the most Instagrammed car company of them all is BMW with 46.9m individual tags. Next is Honda, believe it or not, with 34.8m. Mercedes-Benz trails just fractionally behind on 34.6m (if you combine the #mercedes and #mercedesbenz tags, which isn't an exact science because not everybody using the Mercedes hashtag is talking about motor vehicles). Regardless, the Stuttgart marque is well clear of Audi with its 22m mentions, while Porsche, Ferrari and Lamborghini barely top 20m apiece.
BMW leads the way, then, with Mercedes-Benz number two in the premium sector as far as social media zealotry is concerned. But what I, and I suspect many of you, instinctively feel to be true is that Mercedes has the hearts of the Instagram set that posts online to show off: G63s as props outside enormous houses; C63s roasting tyres. How many times have those images been repeated on Instagram?
The point of mentioning all of this is that Mercedes' image has changed almost beyond recognition over the last decade. From where I'm sitting it's become youthful, sporty and cool, whereas one time it was more refined and well-to-do. The golf club car parks have been replaced by football training grounds.
And this is where we come back to the SLS AMG's legacy, because that turnaround has been the result of a two-pronged attack. The first is the company's unprecedented success in Formula 1, its team dominating the latter half of the last decade with six back-to-back drivers' and manufacturers' titles. Who saw that coming in 2010 when in its debut year it finished fourth in the standings? Team principle Toto Wolff said this in a recent interview with Martin Brundle for Sky Sports F1: 'A Mercedes today is perceived as a sporty car - it wasn't 10 years ago. [Mercedes] has become a really cool brand, but I think we have played our part in helping the brand to change its image by being in Formula 1, by being successful.'
So racing doesn't only improve the breed - in the case of Mercedes-Benz, it has rejuvenated it, too. In tandem with that we've witnessed the irresistible rise of its highly 'grammable performance wing, AMG. From 24,200 sales in 2008 the division registered a massive 132,136 sales in 2019, thanks in the most part to a far busier model line-up (now at more than 30 individual models). While AMG has been around and building great cars for a long time, it was in 2010 that the sub-brand really started to rocket, for it was then that AMG launched its first standalone model. The SLS AMG wasn't an adapted Mercedes-Benz like all AMGs had been before, but the division's first solo effort.
The arrival of the SLS was AMG's Definitely Maybe moment; the thing that sent it stratospheric. Apart from having a halo effect on the rest of the AMG line-up and Mercedes-Benz as a whole, it also demonstrated there could be a very high-performance two-seat Mercedes beyond an SL with eight or 12 cylinders, and that, unlike the SLR McLaren, was actually deigned and built in-house. What's more, the sensational Black Series model (unquestionably one of my favourite modern performance cars), which arrived with 631hp in 2012, proved that the Mercedes-Benz badge could bear the weight of a £230,000 price tag in a way the BMW roundel hasn't yet been able to.
The success of the SLS paved the way for a second standalone AMG in its direct successor, the AMG GT. And would it be a stretch to say that without those two models in its catalogue, Mercedes-Benz might not have had the confidence to green-light the £2m, 275-run AMG One hypercar? All of that activity over the past decade or so has done the business for Mercedes-Benz, not least in bringing down the average age of its buyers. The exact details are a closely guarded secret but anecdotally we know it to be true. In the case of the A-class, for instance, the average age of the people who bought it came down by a full ten years when the third-generation model arrived in 2012.
When we talk about a particular car's legacy, it's very easy to default to considerations of a technical sort. New materials, lightweighting, drivetrain innovations and so on. But while the McLaren F1's technological legacy could well be unmatched, the Ford Mustang and VW Beetle have lasting cultural legacies. The Renault Espace, meanwhile, left a very different sort of legacy, for it brought the MPV segment to life.
The SLS AMG can make no such claim. But in doing more than any other Mercedes-Benz model to overhaul the company's image, its legacy isn't much less significant. None of us knew it back in 2010, but this retro-styled supercar with show-stopping gullwing doors - not to mention that spectacular 6.2-litre naturally-aspirated V8 - was a very straightforward clue that Mercedes-Benz wouldn't satisfy itself with golf club captains and wealthy retirees much longer. The SLS AMG arrived just in time to pick up the famous old brand and deftly lower it right onto the curl of the onrushing Instagram wave.
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