9/10: Maybach 57/62. A committee-built monument to missing the point.
By the early 2000s, DaimlerChrysler was a corporate Titanic. The company was still reeling from W140 cost overruns, desperate to prove fiscal restraint to Wall Street, yet somehow green-lighted its most expensive production car ever. As the band played and the deck chairs were rearranged, the Maybach 57 and 62 emerged. Named for their lengths in decimeters, a unit so obscure that the only other commercial product named with it is from a Rhode Island-based sailboat manufacturer, they debuted in 2002. What appeared was a Frankenstein’s monster of a reanimated W140. This was a platform Mercedes itself had retired four years earlier in favor of the W220 S-Class. The Maybach’s tech was a patchwork of late-1980s bones with a few W220 features tacked on. It was as if DaimlerChrysler’s product planners had missed not just the memo, but the calendar.
In 2003, Rolls-Royce, newly under BMW’s wing, unveiled the Phantom VII. It was all new, immense in scale, unmistakably modern, and deliberately reminiscent of the grand limousines of Rolls-Royce’s past. The Maybach was so thoroughly outdesigned by the Phantom that no matter how many executive ottomans or high-tech options you checked, it was the answer to a question nobody was asking. The Phantom looked and felt like the future of old-money prestige. The Maybach managed only to feel lost. In the company of the new Rolls, the Maybach was less flagship than corporate afterthought, an utter also-ran.
Maybach’s amenities were grand on paper. There were airline-style rear seats, an electrochromic roof, four-zone climate, a fridge, DVD screens, and ottomans you could file expense reports on. The 5.5-liter, later 6.0-liter, bi-turbo V12 delivered zero to sixty in five seconds, despite 6,000 pounds of real-world mass.
Sales, despite a literal Queen Elizabeth II launch spectacle (the ship, not the sovereign) and Jay-Z and Samuel L. Jackson as early owners, never materialized. By 2007, half of U.S. dealers had lost their franchise. By the end, the Maybach was outclassed even by the newly introduced W221 S600, its supposed lesser cousin, in ways that actually mattered. The 57 and 62 became a monument to missed targets, where exclusivity was measured in unsold inventory, and the word Phantom gave Stuttgart project managers the shakes.
Maybach moved fewer cars a year than Mercedes sold S-Classes in a week. Today, a used Maybach costs less than a mid-level Chevy Tahoe, but comes loaded with the existential weight of what might have been.