1963 Mercedes-Benz 190SL - Super Bowl (The) Weeknd

If you caught any playoff football recently you had to have seen at least a passing glimpse of the above Pepsi commercial pre-promoting the halftime show of the Super Bowl on February 7th. The literal game-changing show will feature Canadian pop-star "The Weeknd", real name Abel Makkonen Tesfaye, and in the ad we see him driving up to a stadium, it's not Raymond James Stadium in Tampa where the game will be played, in a "wow, what is that?!" vintage convertible.

Clearly the car in the ad is mere window dressing and not a focal point of the ad, as it it shouldn't be, but since you're here you're no doubt intrigued as to what it is. The long and short of it is it's a 1963 Mercedes-Benz 190SL. 

You could be forgiven for thinking it was the 190SL's far more famous big-brother, the famed and vaunted 300SL. While we last saw Mr. Weeknd pitching M-B's all-new EQC 400 4MATIC all-electric crossover in M-B ads a little more than a year ago, have to wonder why the producers of this commercial chose to have him in this old 190 and not a newer M-B. If they chose to use a Mercedes-Benz in the first place. Maybe this is his car? Then again, if they chose to use the EQC there would have been some some co-op dollars involved and that gets messy. In the end, this ad is a Pepsi commercial plain and simple. 

The most famous of the Mercedes-Benz SL's are these "gullwing" 300SL models that M-B produced between 1954 and 1957; they made a convertible or "roadster" version from 1957 through 1963. The 190SL was offered as a less expensive alternative to the pricey 300SL and shared the 300SL's basic styling, engineering and little else. The biggest structural difference between the two is that on the 190, Mercedes-Benz eschewed the 300SL's expensive tubular "spaceframe" using a modified version of the then current M-B "W121" chassis or platform. 

That amalgamation of then existing M-B designs and chassis' explains why the car "The Weeknd" is driving in the commercial looks like all other M-B's of the time period - while simultaneously appearing to be quite different. 

Another differentiation between the two SL's is their engines. The "190" in 190SL refers to the car's 1.9-liter, inline four-cylinder engine like the one in the 1961 190SL above left. The "300" in 300SL denotes a 3.0-liter, inline six-cylinder engine like the engine above right from a 1954 SL300. 

"SL" on both models denotes either "Sport-Leicht" or "Super-Leicht"; sport-light or super-light. I think it was meant to mean "Sport-Light" as it would be odd that Mercedes-Benz would emphasize the curb weight of these cars since, at least relative to the weight of American cars at the time, especially with regards to the 300SL, they were certainly no leicht-weights. The 300SL coming in at approximately thirty-three hundred pounds, the 190 a rather svelte twenty-five hundred. Meanwhile a typical 1955 Chevrolet sedan weighed just thirty-one hundred pounds; a V-8 powered '55 Corvette just twenty-eight hundred pounds. 

Super-leight indeed.