Let the Sunshine In or R129 Optional Panoramic Roof

When we began to read up and look at the R129 Mercedes SL's available, one of the desirable options frequently mentioned on forums was the panoramic roof. You can spot one because the shape of the panoramic roof is slightly more rounded from standard hardtop and it has bigger side windows as you can see:

Mercedes R129 standard hardtop (Source: Wikipedia)

vs.

Mercedes R129 panoramic hardtop

It didn't become an option straight away - various sources give different versions as to when it was introduced that vary between 1995-1997.

Pah, we thought, well that's a pointless feature. Why would anyone want a panoramic roof? Especially at such a massive extra cost (at the time of writing this, I can see some on ebay, with the lowest priced at £1250, the one in our colour being £1650). Bet it's not going to be nice either - won't make a difference when it's rainy (which it is most of the time) and will get very hot when it's sunny. Plus the panoramic hardtop is much heavier than the normal one. Pah.

And then we sat in a car with a panoramic roof... and suddenly we knew that we wouldn't settle for anything else.

Either because it's unlined and therefore thinner or due to the unrestricted view above or for both of these reasons, it felt like there was a lot more headroom in the car. This may not matter for shorter people but considering we are both significantly above average height, it makes a huge difference. Normally in low sports cars it feels like the roof is pretty much on our heads (how the hell Jeremy Clarkson manages to climb into all sorts of claustrophobic cars and make it look comfortable is beyond me).

Panoramic roof also makes it easier for us to see the traffic lights - usually it's a problem because of how curved the windscreen is, with pillars and roof cutting off a lot of the view above, but now we can simply look through the roof.

Also, the fears that it would make it uncomfortably hot when it's sunny have not been confirmed - saw no difference to the old car.


So now our attitude is more along the lines of "how could you not want to have it???"