Mercedes SLS AMG Black Series planned?

It looks like Mercedes could be planning a 700bhp Black Series version of the SLS AMG Gullwing

Currently, the top of the AMG Black Series tree is the SL65 Black. An awesome machine, but a bit of a lost soul. It loses the one thing that makes the SL special – the trick roof – and replaces it with a wave of power that isn’t actually that easy to put down on the road. It also doesn’t handle as well as you’d expect – it’s just too cumbersome.

But the prospect of an SLS AMG Black is a very appealing one. If you endow the SLS with the sort of setup the SL65 Black has – the V12 twin-turbo – and put it on a diet with extensive use of carbon fibre panels, you would have a monster of a car. We could easily see something close to 700bhp with a 0-60mph in the very low 3 second range and a top speed of up to 225mph.

Such a halo SLS would command prices similar to those of the last Mercedes Supecar – the McLaren SLR – which would put it up over £300,000. But with the sort of performance potential an SLS Black would have that shouldn’t provide too much of an obstacle to sales. After all, the SL65 Black wasn’t a lot cheaper than that and all 10 cars that came to the UK sold by lottery -such was the demand (although the Germans apparently struggled to shift their allocation of 40 cars).

So a limited run of SLS AMG Black Series cars is a very good possibility. I know of one a guy – a friend and real petrol-head – who had the SLS AMG on order long before the world knew much about it. But he was dreadfully disappointed when the details of the SLS were revealed – he was expecting power in the 650bhp range (are you reading this, Frank?). So I know Mercedes will have at least one customer for the SLS AMG Black.

And there are a lot more people in the world just like Frank. Although, of course, there’s no one quite like Frank!

By Cars UK