But with the Roadster’s roof down, you get to enjoy the full, thunderous blast of the mighty 571-hp, 6.2-litre V8 engine by Mercedes’ in-house tuning division AMG. The SLS simply sounds magnificent, but in the Coupe, those boulevard onlookers get to enjoy more of the soundtrack than you do. Almost all who are lucky enough to have driven both agree that the noise outweighs the loss of those doors, and makes the Roadster the one to pick. 
Not that the Roadster is in any way uncouth. You can enter and exit the cabin far more elegantly with the roof down than in the Coupe with its wide door sills. There’s little wind buffeting, even at very high speed, and the fierce heated seats and ‘airscarf’ system that directs warm air through a vent in the seat directly to the back of your neck means you can keep the roof down even when the temperature is down too. And the engine note is only loud when you want it to be. At a cruise, it is remarkably civilized; so much so that when I turned to ask my wife what she thought of the Roadster as we made our home in one after a lunch date, I found she’d nodded off. There aren’t many open-topped supercars in which that will happen.
