9/10: Maybach 57/62. A committee-built monument to missing the point.
The Maybach 57 and 62 score 9/10 because they do not merely fail one axis. They miss almost all of them at once. Price, theater, engineering inheritance, social function, and depreciation logic all point in the same direction, which is rare. By the early 2000s, DaimlerChrysler was still sorting through the aftershocks of maximalist Mercedes engineering while trying to prove corporate discipline, yet somehow green-lighted its most extravagant production luxury car. 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 it was only otherwise used by an American sailboat company—they debuted in 2002 as limousines built from yesterday’s confidence and tomorrow’s bill. What appeared was a Frankenstein’s monster of a reanimated W140. Mercedes itself had retired that architecture in favor of the W220 S-Class. The Maybach’s tech was a patchwork of late-era Mercedes bones with newer 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 answered 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.
Maybach’s amenities were grand on paper. There were airline-style rear seats, an electrochromic roof, four-zone climate control, 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 roughly 6,000 pounds of real-world mass. As machinery, the Maybach was not incompetent. That is part of the problem. Its competence only made the strategic mistake cleaner.
Sales, despite a literal Queen Elizabeth II launch spectacle—the ship rather than the sovereign—and celebrity early owners, never materialized. By 2007, half of U.S. dealers had lost their franchise. By the end, the Maybach was outclassed by the newly introduced W221 S600, its supposed lesser cousin, in ways that actually mattered. The 57 and 62 became monuments to missed targets, where exclusivity was measured in unsold inventory, and the word Phantom gave Stuttgart project managers the shakes.
Today, the used Maybach carries the existential weight of what might have been and the repair logic of what absolutely was. The depreciation is not a side effect. It is part of the score.