Mercedes-Benz 300 SL

This is the catalogue record of the Mercedes-Benz 300 SL, one of 383 models Mercedes-Benz has placed in the historical record and one of more than seventeen thousand cars the MotorJury library tracks. The record places its introduction in 1954. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Mercedes-Benz 300 SL properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1950s were the optimistic post-war boom, when chrome, tailfins and new unibody construction met the first purpose-built motorways and sports-car racing shaped reputations. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Chevrolet Chevrolet Corvette, the Cadillac Cadillac Eldorado, the Toyota Toyota Land Cruiser — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Mercedes-Benz 300 SL reads like this: the record lists its engine as 2996 cc M198 straight-six engine; kerb weight is recorded at Coupé 1295 kg, Roadster 1330 kg, from 1961 1370 kg; drive goes through 4-speed manual; the layout is FR layout. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear.

Its place in the Mercedes-Benz story

Within Mercedes-Benz's own catalogue the Mercedes-Benz 300 SL sits alongside the Mercedes-Benz C124, the Mercedes-Benz C253, the Mercedes-Benz C254, the Mercedes-Benz F100 (1991). The record names the Mercedes-Benz W194 (racing car) as its predecessor and the Mercedes-Benz W113 (230SL) / Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Friedrich Geiger. Assembly is recorded at West Germany: Stuttgart-Untertürkheim.

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

From catalogue to ownership

The catalogue records what the Mercedes-Benz 300 SL was; the ownership database records what it is like to own. MotorJury computes a verdict for every model year the United States federal record covers — complaints, recalls, real economy — refreshed nightly, with no opinions involved. If this car reached the American market, its verdicts are in there.