From every angle you look this car there’s something taking your attention. The stylish coupe design is already widely known, and so are the gullwing doors, but when you get used to the exclusive chrome blue painting, take a look at the front air intake. Its different design reveals this car is not an usual SLS, but this low-profile sign isn’t followed at all by this car’s performance. This new version has everything to add some new values to the current idea of electric vehicles, and at this article you’ll read why.
What are your oldest memories about electric cars? Maybe Saturn EV1, Honda Insight or even the hybrid Toyota Prius, aren’t them? All these cars came in the late 1990s as the very first alternatives to the massive use of petrol, but at first it was very hard to convince people to buy one. And why can’t we blame them? Because in spite of all the green appeal, their problems at that time didn’t affect too much their quality as products, but their image. The autonomy was very limited and the batteries were a headache: too expensive to get rid of the old ones properly and too expensive to obtain new ones. As little doom is silly, their prices were also much higher than their petrol similars. Besides that, those engines could barely take their weight to street speeds, so you had to forget luxury and specially performance – the lack of the typical engine noise was a permanent reminder of that. And if you thought their design could help you pretend to everyone outside you’d bought the perfect car… They were well-designed, there’s no denial of that. But their conception of that was the literal one: if their primitive batteries were as heavy as necessary, the only way of optimizing the limited power was to facilitate the air flow, rather than focus at stylish lines.
This combination couldn’t help giving the EVs the terrible impression of taking a lot of your money in exchange of not so palpable benefits. However, it took some more years but this scenario winded up starting to change. Their big leap begun when some movie stars bought themselves some of them, and when Arnold Schwarzenegger estabilished more severe environmental politics when governing the North-American state of California. These facts helped to give the EVs the direction they needed: they dived into the popular culture. Day after day their fame got better, also because there were more companies producing them and improving their technologies. Therefore, from the rejection of Saturn EV1 whose explanation even motivated conspiracy theories, the late 2000s saw the following generations of Toyota Prius consolidating it as a huge commercial success, which helped to build the vision of hybrids and EVs as a symbol of the next times. But there was still one smaller problem, but still important: these cars got more efficient, much more beautiful and even a little cheaper, but the personality matter wasn’t solved yet. The common cars’ “green versions” managed to conciliate both sides a little better, but if you wanted to be totally ecological it still took giving up some of those subjective factors which have built the modern cars’ fame.
And now is the moment to invite Mercedes-Benz’s release. The enormous technological advances of the latest times have allowed also big improvements to the EVs, but now finally dedicated to their personality. Now buying a hybrid or electric version (such as Ford Fusion Hybrid) or entire model (like Renault Zoe) doesn’t have to mean taking worse performance and lack of luxury inside the same external body, and Mercedes’ latest release is an excellent example of that. When would you expect an electric version to be 177 hp more powerful than the gasoline one? Well, SLS has not only done it as also maintaining its own interior sophistication level. This comes from nothing less than four electric engines (one at each wheel) to, combined, generate 740 hp (!) and 1000 Nm of torque. This allows it to make 0 to 60 mph in 3s9, but the top speed was limited at 155 mph probably due to safety reasons. Only the batteries weigh 1208 pounds (the autonomy wasn’t revealed), but this car received the same high performance preparation as the gasoline versions. There are huge carbon brake calipers, and the AMG Torque Dynamics system can provide traction to each wheel the needed amount and even work in three modes: Comfort, Sport and Sport Plus. SLS Electric Drive will start its sales in a few months.
