My name is William. I have parted silver hair. I wear white pants after Labor Day. I pour Michelob Ultra over ice. I get a golf cart even if we're just playing the back nine. Marmaduke is the summit of comedy! I drive a 2000 Mercedes SLK230 Kompressor. I tell everyone my car has a turbo.

To understand the SLK230 you have to understand what it was like growing up in the late 1990's. In the late 1990's, if you had a dial-up connection and a rudimentary understanding of the stock market, you could make surprising bank. Everything was going up! Put money in and watch it grow! You didn't even have to be all that smart. NASDAQ was an infinite erection. Computers, and the so-called "digital Age" or "Information Super Highway" was a Golden Goose that people thought would lay eggs forever and end the tyranny of punch-clocks.

"You can retire at age 39!" we inaccurately thought, as author Jeremy Rifkin put it in his book of the same name, it was "The End of Work." Rifkin's 1995 book was not about e-money, or universal self-employment, or e-business, so much as it was a warning; a longform version of Springsteen's "My Hometown;" Foreman says "these jobs are going, boys, and they ain't coming back."

Yet, in the late 90's and the year 2000, we did think we'd all be millionaires with our AOL Keywords, Palm Pilots, and digital cameras. We saw ourselves sucking down Orbits fruit drinks, selling our Beanie Baby collections, and buying Plymouth Prowlers with the profits to complement our Mercedes roadsters, not our Mazda roadsters.

The SLK230 was a cheap roadster bought with your successful Scottrade portfolio. The CD changer is in the trunk, waiting to accept five copies of Fleetwood Mac's 1997 live album "The Dance." The Mac is back! Everything is going to be OK! My traction control is so Nanny-State, it flashes at me if I let the clutch out too fast! I love rules!

The SLK230 engine configuration sounds great written out:

2.3L Straight FourTwin CamFour-valves per-cylinder Twin Vortices-type supercharger.

Wonderful! How fun! Yes just like a Miata but more!

Redline 5,800 RPM...

What?! It's a twin-cam with 16 valves! Why can't I rev it like any other zippy four-banger? It's not like the superchargers limit engine revolutions. The 1989 Toyota MR2 AW11 SC had a roots-style supercharger boosting a 16v engine all the way to 7,500rpm! The Merc can barely touch six-grand. Worse, the SLK230's five-speed manual has gear ratios longer than the line at a Pennsylvanian State-Store the day before Thanksgiving.

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The supercharger does work, I concede. At 2,000 rpm in fifth gear, you can go wide-open-throttle and pass people on the highway. When you get above 4,000 rpm you will hear a slight whine from the tiny blower. You can imagine you're in a Mustang with a Procharger for a little while. Once you pass 5,000 rpm, the power begins to drop off.

Cruising is what the SLK230 does very well: sunny day, top down, soft-serve ice cream, big smiles. That's why you buy this little piece of nouveau riche. You're meant to drive it like every WASP drives their C5: one mile-per-hour below the speed limit, in top gear, while waving to sidewalk-stroller-pushers. If you need to get up a hill, just put your foot down because the 2.3L Kompressor feels like a V6.

If the SLK230 blown-four feels just like a N/A V6...why not just put in a V6 and be done with it? You'd have a simpler engine that can go longer distances. Oh, they did...it's the SLK320. For the price of an SLK320, you could have a fresh Corvette C5 and be able to pull any hill in the Appalachians and everyone at Heisler's Dairy Bar will still be your friend. But you didn't want friends. You wanted a Mercedes.

They wanted a car that produced the top down smiles of the Miata but with a big badge that showed that they had planned out their day trading better than the person who could afford only a Miata. That makes the SLK230 the ultimate calling card of the 90s: Status without substance. It was ok to drive, but that fancy pants folding roof was its calling card. Who else dared to put a folding roof on a small car like that? Who else dared to get rid of your trunk? It was dot com excess in a tiny package. It appealed to anyone that wanted the latest and greatest, and didn't care how they had to compromise to get it. Or what they had to spend.

And it meant Mercedes found a way to sell people Miatas for more than twice the price. That makes the SLK230 simply brilliant.

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