the german couple's car

The price was DM 29,000 (Deutsche mark) or $11,000 back in the fifties. It was an exclusive and expensive car back then.

How nice of you to link this! Thank you. Magnificent wheels.

In all fairness, though, yes the Benz has its charm but really nothing beats my neighbor's golf cart. Pure fun. Why he got one, I have no idea. I look out one day and he's driving down his (short like 15 second walk) driveway to get the mail. Brand new golf cart. Convertible too. Style. It's the best to go down to the store, snacks, ice cream, or at night go out for drinks: you pull up in your golf cart. Cops don't even know if they can ticket it. They still don't know what to do with it. There's that golf cart, up on the curb again! Arriba!

You're partially right. The 300SL coupe in this film has about as much in common with the LeMans 300SLR as a Camry in a Toyota showroom has with Toyota's NASCAR Camry racer. The 300 SLR used a straight EIGHT engine based on the engine in the Mercedes-Benz W196 Formula One car which won the world championship in 1954 and 1955. In Daimler-Benz speak, this car was officially the "W196S;" the D-B marketing department, however, chose to link it to Mercedes commercial production by calling it the "300SLR." Seven competition chassis were completed as open roadsters; two more were built as gull-wing coupes for the cancelled 1955 Carrera Panamericana and never raced. With a suitcase-sized muffler attached to the right-side exhaust pipes, one of these was used by D-B competition engineer Rudolf Uhlenhaut as his "daily driver" and can be seen today in the Mercedes museum.

http://www.supertightstuff.com/06/14/motoring/potd-mercedes-300slr-backfire/

Film note: Scheduled to take over the wheel of that 300SLR that crashed into the 1955 LeMans crowd was its American co-driver, John Fitch. Fitch had been the technical advisor for Henry Hathaway's "The Racers" with Kirk Douglas, Bella Darvi and Lee J. Cobb which opened 18 days before the LeMans tragedy.