Shopping Tools   2003 Mercedes-Benz SL500  Road Test   2003
Mercedes-Benz SL500   Say what you will about the cheese-block
lines and frumpy two-tone paint schemes of the outgoing
Mercedes-Benz SL, it was no slave to fads. For 13 years the
R129, as Mercedes engineers knew it, bucked changing fashions to
embody the company's traditional love of precision engineering,
contemporary technology, and restrained design. It was a silk
pinstripe on a rack of polyester pretenders.  And as the R129
points its rectilinear nose into the sunset, it's reasonable to
expect that the replacement, the R230, which pioneers a new
electrohydraulic brake technology (see sidebar) and has a
folding hardtop whose choreography would stand with a Bolshoi
number, will emulate the pattern. Germans make things to endure.
The Brandenburg Gate survived the Halifax bomber, for example.
So shall the conservative SL stay its course against the fashion
onslaught of chichi new droptops.  Or will it? Today's
plutocrats want more than just safe, dig