The Hindu Business Line : Feel like a million bucks in a Maybach

There are only a few automobiles in the world that evoke the aura of royalty. The Rolls-Royce brand has been the all-time favourite and has had a long history of ownership and association with Indian maharajahs. But a brand that has an equally impressive history of development as a super-luxury automobile is the Maybach. However, though this brand is evocative of the feeling of royalty (not due to its stratospheric pricing alone), the Maybach brand's association with real royalty was far less compared to the Rolls. After all, it was only a German marquee.

Despite its relatively lower association with kings and knights, the Maybach (pronounced `My-back') brand has a unique presence in the super-luxury passenger car segment. To be seen in one is still a temptation few from even the princely class can resist. So, how could we?

DaimlerChrysler India recently invited us for a drive in the Mercedes Maybach 62 and, but naturally, we said yes. After all, like Oscar Wilde's oft-repeated quote, the only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.

Aura of a historical brand

The Maybach makes a statement of style, understated elegance and opulence even when it is standing still. Those who can afford it know that it will be a stellar addition to their 30-car garage, a unique jewel that despite its staid lines will still quite literally dwarf the other more popular and much less expensive riff-raff. For the bourgeois who can't afford it, the Maybach is just a Rs 6-crore car.

Super-luxury cars have to have a chequered history and the more they connect with aristocracy, the better their image. Rolls-Royce and Bentley have managed to build that image by default thanks to their long history of being two of the vehicles of choice for the British royalty.

The Mercedes Maybach is a relative upstart in the world of super-luxury cars. Wilhelm Maybach and his son Karl founded the original Maybach-Motorenbau GmbH. There was only about 20 years of development history during the pre-War years in Germany for the brand. During that time, the Maybach brand became popular for opulent, classic vehicles. But awareness about the brand's image is still low despite the acquisition of the brand by Mercedes and its revival nine years ago in 1997.

Most prestigious, super-luxury cars are designed to exude an aura of old-world charm, to look exclusive, even as they seem not too uncomplicated. They are clearly built to impress even in the dimensions department, but have none of the pretensions or brashness that stretch limousines, that are so popular in the US, have.

The Mercedes Maybach's character is no different. This luxury car has great presence on the road; the exclusive luxury features to please the most discerning maharajah and it has the dimensions to more than match the best in this class.

Club and first class

The Maybach is offered with two basic variants: The Maybach 57 and the Maybach 62, the distinction between the two largely being the size of the vehicle. In case if you are wondering what the numbers indicate, they stand for the length of the car in decimetres. We were offered a drive in the Maybach 62, the long-wheel version, which at 62 decimetres from end-to-end, is more than 20-feet long! And it is also over six-feet wide.

DaimlerChrysler India had organised the Maybach ride and called it `Exploring the Golden Triangle' to refer to the historic route the drive was to take us on, commencing in New Delhi and going on to Agra and Jaipur before returning to Delhi.

Apart from its exceptionally clean and gleaming paint job, the exclusive 19-inch alloys, the large, wide-opening doors and, of course, its sheer length, the Maybach does seem like just another expensive saloon. In fact, the new Mercedes S-Class sedan's rear has a number of resemblances with the current Maybach's rear. But similarities don't extend beyond that.

No stock cars of the Maybach are built to be stashed away in a parking yard somewhere for catering to future customer orders. It is built mostly by hand and after the buyer places each highly customised order with the company's authorised dealers.

Ultra personalisation

The Mercedes Maybach is meant to be a super luxury vehicle that will be a comfortable, personalised cocoon used for daily travel by the successful business magnate or head of state. And the stress is on personalisation with more than a million different combinations that can be possible, starting from the type of upholstery to the type of real wood trim to be used for the dashboard to the kind of carpeting and even the style of mood lighting that the buyer may want recreated at night inside the cabin.

Of course, the regulars such as a mini-bar for champagne, large screen plasma or LCD TVs, fax machines, laptop computer, satellite phone, etc., can all be part of the combination that the buyer chooses. With so much personalisation being possible, the process of ordering a Maybach is likened to commissioning a private jet or a personal luxury yacht.

The whole ultra-personalised solution that is offered for the Maybach begins with the process of choosing the options and individualisation that the buyer wants in the Maybach Studio. If the buyer so chooses, he can actually witness his very own car being manufactured at the plant in Germany. The usual time taken for manufacturing and delivery the personalised car is four to five months.

The Maybach 62 that we rode had a combination of standard and premium features, which are offered as optional add-ons. Perforated soft leather seats could be tilted to many different angles to make the ride more comfortable, including a fully pushed back, reclined bed position as in a first class airline seat. The seats are also individually cooled or heated and feature presets for easy and quick adjustments while getting in and out of the car.

Palace on wheels

Princely interiors

One of the exclusive features that the test ride drive Maybach 62 came fitted with was the high-tech panoramic glass roof. The electro-transparent panoramic glass roof adorned by elegant strips of fine wood arranged in squares offers passengers a unique way of adjusting interior lighting. The hand-built high-tech system can be set to opaque or transparent at the mere push of a button.

Transparency can be varied by means of an electrically powered sliding liner. The liner lights up when an electrical voltage is passed through it, with controls allowing the light intensity to be adjusted.

The standard features of the Maybach are already a long, impressive list. It comes with an Airmatic-DC suspension system, automatic power-closing doors, 19-inch alloy wheels, 21-speaker Bose audio system, rear-seat entertainment system including two screens and an auxiliary output unit. A glass partition separating the driver section and the rear for added privacy, electrically operated window curtains and a hands-free intercom to communicate with the driver have also been provided for increased convenience of rear passengers (read owner).

Finally, topping the Maybach's impressive spec-sheet is its 5.5-litre, twin-turbocharged, V12 engine that puts out a whopping 550bhp of peak power at 5,250 rpm and the peak torque of 900Nm starts arriving from as low as 2,300 rpm. The engine is combined with a five-speed automatic transmission. Those statistics would lead most into thinking that the powerplant would roar into life and make its presence felt quite obviously inside the car.

Smooth drive

But as our chauffeured ride in the Maybach showed, it is quite the contrary. The engine barely purrs and does a great job of pulling this hulk of a car with ease. Noise and road feedback are almost completely absent. The airmatic suspension was also extremely effective in cancelling the feedback and noise from both the potholed and blacktopped stretches of highway that was frequently the road conditions we met with during the Golden Triangle drive.

The cabin can be so silent and the air-conditioning so discreet and quiet that catching 40 winks will be easy in the Maybach. And when you are awake there will be enough gadgetry to fiddle around with.

The Maybach pins on its exclusivity and bespoke manufacturing for being considered an appealing home on wheels by the rich. DaimlerChrysler expects that the discerning Indian billionaire will be able to appreciate both its bloodline and its modernity. After all, considering that he will be paying as much as he would for a small island in the Indian Ocean, he had better feel like a million bucks in the Maybach.

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