The Mercedes-Benz Gullwing Coming Back

If you want feel sensation and wondwefull car you can drive this car. Derived from the racing car, the body structure required a very high door sill to accommodate the frame members. This would necessitate extra clearance in the roof. In the end, the simplest way to accommodate the chassis structure and the necessary clearance for the human form was just to hinge the doors in the roof, rather than at the cowl. That’s the way they did it in the race car and, in this case, expedience made it into production.
It may have been something of an engineering accident, but the Gullwing was glamorous.
Hollywood stars had SL’s, Clark Gable among them.
The Gullwing occupied an interesting position in the lineage of the automotive world.
First, and perhaps foremost, it was the first car Mercedes-Benz produced after World War II that said the company was prepared to produce the best, in every way. Yes, Mercedes had built other quality cars after the war, but they were stodgy and stodgy in an era which was ruled by Harley Earl and GM’s design department didn’t cut it.
Nothing else compared to a 300 SL Gullwing. It had it all. It had quality. It had a race heritage. It had looks. Even the luggage was specially made to fit the luggage compartment. The pages of the catalogs were on paper so hard, shiny, and thick that you just knew the car had to be perfection.

Second, it was something of a cross-breed. All of the true sporting cars that had existed before World War II had died, with the exception of Mercedes-Benz and Alfa-Romeo, the later not really having much mattered since the early 1930’s. Post-war, the Italians were developing a sports car industry, using body builders within their country. But what they created wasn’t up to driving any real distance. A Ferrari was not the car you chose when you wanted to drive to Chicago from Toledo.
There was an absence, in that day, of automotive vision. Harley Earl and GM had in mind styling and the mass market. But the concept that had animated Duesenberg – the notion of a car that combined both luxury and unparalleled performance – had no successor.