Four-seat coupe featured an SL nose on a shortened E-Class chassis, plus doors inspired by the legendary 1950s 300SL
https://www.carscoops.com/author/chris-chilton-cc/
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by Chris Chilton
3 hours ago
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The 300SL Gullwing built between 1954-57 is one of Mercedes’ most famous cars, but it took until 2010 and the launch of the SLS for Benz to revisit the idea of a production car with gullwing doors.
Sure, Mercedes had toyed with the feature, applying it to concepts and experimental cars like the C111s and C112, but if you wanted a road-going Mercedes in the 1980s and ’90s with gullwing doors you had to throw your money in the direction of Europe’s tuning community. Firms like Styling Garage and Sbarro could graft the fancy doors onto a big C126 (500SEC) coupe, but easily the best resolved and rarest of the lot is the smaller, prettier Boschert B300.
Starting with a regular 300CE, the coupe version of the 1980s E-Class sedan, Hartmut Boschert brought the C-pillar forward by 250 mm (9.8 inches), then added extra strength to the sills and roof to allow the fitment of gullwing doors that measured a massive 1,660 mm (65.4 inches) so that passengers could access both the front and back seats.
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The front seats were borrowed from the then-new R129 SL, but more importantly, so was the sleek nose, which Boschert grafted onto the E-Class shell, doing such a good job that the whole car could pass for a factory effort. But there was one thing the SL had that the 300 CE didn’t, and that was a V8 power option, so Boschert had the coupe’s 3.0-liter inline six fitted with twin turbochargers. The upgrade boosted the power to 279 hp (283 PS), although that was still some way off the 322 hp (326 PS) an SL500 delivered.
And while the SL500 was expensive, it wasn’t as pricey as the Boschert coupe, so the coachbuilt coupe got plenty of publicity at the 1989 Frankfurt Motor Show, but not many orders. Boschert had hoped to build 300 cars, but in the end he only sold 10 and none of those has the expensive gullwing door option, making this original show car the only one of its kind.
Recently refreshed with new paint and upholstery, it’s being auctioned by RM Sotheby’s this November and is expected to sell for €250,000-300,000 ($265-318k). That’s about a tenth of what you’d pay to buy a real 300SL Gullwing, but it’s also way more than you’d need to spend to put an SLS in your garage. Which would you pick?
H/T to Silodrome
