Crossing the Blues

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Plastic dreams: SLS

The movie inception reminded me the ugly truth of dream and reality. When we dream of something, we don’t dream of something dull, ugly or plastic. Therefore we don’t want to have these things in our real life also. Especially when you dream of cars, you don’t dream of dull, ugly, slow and plastic. Unfortunately car companies don’t like to create dream which avoid these facts!

Especially the Mercedes, a few days ago I saw the SLS AMG. The real one! And I felt nothing; I didn’t feel the same excitement when I saw the Bentley Arnage. SLS is just a contemporary refurbishment of 1950s Gullwing model with park sensors. It was not something special! Sure, it has many new technologies, very fast and looks okay.

The main reason for my disappointment is the addiction of plastic. Unfortunately SLS AMG has couple of cheap plastic parts inside the car. This time Mercedes was cleaver and they hide those plastics in goods places. But when you pay huge amount of money for a car, you don’t want to find hidden plastic parts. SLS AMG has the cheap feeling plastic parts for the seat adjustments. The button which moves the seat to desired position is made by plastic and from very cheap one. Even the CL has better looking metal buttons for this thing. I do know that SLS AMG is focused on weight saving but they could have used carbon fibre instead of plastic. I think Mercedes thought, nobody will ever bothered with those plastics and let’s ignore the carbon fibre. And they transformed a perfect dream into plastic reality.

Mercedes can say; Ferrari and Lamborghini have plastic parts. But they are Ferrari and Lamborghini. They don’t produce diesel powered estate cars! Therefore, Mercedes should be much much better than those cars. Because, they are real dreams and in those dreams people might ignore the material quality.

And I have never seen a footstep made from soft plastic and looks terribly cheap in any other car! Even the Mercedes G Class offers blue lighted chrome Mercedes foot step.