While Maybach represents a fraction of Mercedes’s total deliveries, which last year amounted to 2.4 million vehicles, boosting sales of high-earning models is a necessary counterbalance to ballooning spending that’s weighing on earnings. Customers have also clamored for a US$366,000 convertible with quilted seats and matching luggage. The world’s most expensive SUV at around $500,000, the full-size G50 is able to cross desert dunes powered by a V12 engine, and features a retractable, landaulet-style fabric roof in the back. Just over a year ago, the carmaker presented the Mercedes-Maybach G50, with a limited run of just 99 vehicles. In the past couple of years, Mercedes has unveiled attention-grabbing limited-edition Maybach derivatives, helping drive home the Stuttgart-based manufacturer’s luxury standing even as most of its customers drive an A-Class compact or C-Class sedan. An earlier try in 2001 was dropped following almost a decade of losses. That version, currently priced at US$168,600, is the company’s second effort to revive the 1930s-era name in a challenge to BMW AG’s Rolls-Royce brand. Buyers in the country have snapped up more than 60 per cent of the 25,000 Maybach sedans that Mercedes has sold since rolling out the model in 2015. Putting a Maybach crossover into Chinese showrooms would tap into a ready audience for the nameplate.
Mercedes declined to outline any plans for a battery vehicle for the Maybach subbrand. The concept being shown in Beijing features an electric drive with a 320-kilometre range. The crossover would add to Mercedes’s growing line of lucrative top-end vehicles, such as this year’s gas-guzzling AMG GT four-door coupe, as the world’s biggest luxury-car maker seeks revenue to finance its expensive shift to battery technology. It’s “a totally new archetype, of a kind never seen before,” Gorden Wagener, chief design officer at Mercedes parent Daimler AG, said in a statement Tuesday in advance of the Beijing International Automotive Exhibition.
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