10/10: Maybach Landaulet.
The Landaulet is more candid about its intended audience than the regular Maybach. The rear roof opens while the chauffeur remains under a fixed roof. Its central luxury is not merely fresh air, which can be obtained much more cheaply, but a particular arrangement of visibility: the passenger becomes the object of attention while the work of driving remains enclosed elsewhere.
Producing that arrangement requires more than cutting a hole behind the B-pillars. Maybach retained the side structure and reinforced it, provided a folding rear roof, and separated the two compartments. Those decisions preserve the formal silhouette while giving the rear occupants a different relationship to the surroundings. It is a very elaborate response to the question of which people in a car should be able to see the sky.
The compartment contrast completes the staging. The launch presentation used a dark chauffeur’s area and a pale rear cabin; a partition could provide privacy between them. The interesting contradiction is not that the passenger simultaneously seeks attention and privacy, since the two are directed toward different people. The partition, roof treatment, and contrasting compartments turn the passenger and chauffeur roles into physical architecture. One audience gets the performance. Another is paid to move it along.
That earns 10 without requiring a fictional monarchy or a claim that limousines have lost every purpose. The Landaulet can perform its chosen job extremely well. The score measures how far that job has traveled from ordinary transportation. A convertible generally opens a car to its surroundings. The Landaulet opens only the rear compartment, turning roof operation into a visible distinction between passenger and chauffeur.
Beyond that point, an extra mark requires an unusually accomplished contradiction.
11/10: Lancia Thema 8.32 by Ferrari. This one goes to 11.
The Thema 8.32 earns it by putting a Ferrari-derived V8 where an executive sedan’s front wheels have to accommodate both steering and propulsion. The restraint of the body makes the decision better, not saner. This is not a Ferrari pretending to be a family car; it is a family-shaped luxury car whose engine compartment has acquired a highly specialized alternative career.
The Thema belonged to the Type Four collaborative program alongside the Fiat Croma, Saab 9000, and Alfa Romeo 164. Shared development did not make the four bodies, chassis calibrations, or brands interchangeable. Calling the Lancia an Italianized Saab therefore misses the interesting act of independence. The common program supplied an opportunity for rationalization. Lancia used its version to house an engine from Ferrari.
The relevant ancestry is the 3.0-liter V8 of the 308 and Mondial Quattrovalvole, not the larger 328 engine. The Thema application changed the engine’s character for sedan use, including a cross-plane rather than Ferrari’s characteristic flat-plane crankshaft. That alters the balance and exhaust pulse arrangement; it is not merely the deletion of a dramatic noise. Lancia wanted a Ferrari connection without requiring an executive sedan to behave as though every trip were an approach to the redline.
The packaging is the more durable joke. A transverse V8 in the nose concentrates a great deal of interesting machinery in a space that must also accommodate a transmission, steering, cooling, and ordinary service access. The engineering task was to make that arrangement work as a refined sedan, not simply to win an argument by opening the hood.
Inside, wood and carefully finished upholstery supplied a credible luxury setting; Poltrona Frau leather was an available specification rather than a reason to ignore the other trim choices. The electrically retractable rear spoiler offered a discreet way to advertise the exceptional engine when discretion became tiresome. It also added a moving assembly to a trunk lid. The Thema thus managed to combine understated appearance with a switch-operated exception to understated appearance.
A later Chrysler-derived Thema suggests an entertaining counterfactual: another deliberately incongruous Ferrari engine, another executive body, another service department arranging an urgent meeting. But the real 8.32 needs no fictional successor or invented conversation with Enzo Ferrari. Its distinction is that Lancia turned an apparently unreasonable combination into an actual car. The eleventh point recognizes the distance traveled between the sensible platform program and the engine chosen to complete it. Rationalization had a lovely time until someone opened the hood.
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