Mercedes Maybach . THE CATASTROPHE OF THE WORLD'S MOST LUXURIOUS CAR

The revival of the legendary Maybach brand, once a maker of super-luxurious cars with V12 engines, was underway. At Mercedes, they decided that a car had to appear that would be many times superior to premium machines like the S-Class, BMW 7 Series, and Audi A8. They weren't lavish enough, to say the least. The new car had to surpass even Rolls-Royce and Bentley, as it was with them that the future Maybach would have to compete. Such a project of the century was only within the power of an auto giant already producing first-class cars. The best minds of the Mercedes concern were convened—the best engineers, the best designers. Money, of course, was no object. Everything had to be prepared—the most advanced and high-tech—to create a car perfect in every respect.

Quite quickly, in order to prepare and astonish the world, a concept car was built based on the legendary Mercedes 140 body. People needed to be shown what the future king of all super-luxury cars would roughly look like. An approximate model of the future Maybach was presented at an auto show. The concept was, of course, luxurious like no other car—leather, wood, power adjustment everywhere possible. The company studied the reaction to its concept, and that reaction was not long in coming. All publications wrote about Maybach, and the headlines were only in an admiring style. Billionaires were surprised, ordinary people were shocked. Could such a car really appear? And for whom would it be intended? In short, they managed to amaze. But this was just a prototype; now a production model had to be created.

From 1997 to 2002—that is, for 5 years—engineers toiled over the revival of the legendary Maybach, finding the most modern and perfect technical solutions in the world. Design and testing took up the lion's share of the entire creation time. The body, made of steel and aluminum, had phenomenal torsional rigidity. Independent suspensions were, of course, equipped with pneumatic systems. The five-speed automatic transmission was tuned so that shifts were as smooth and imperceptible as possible. The engine—the jewel from the auto giant Mercedes—was a 5.5-liter twelve-cylinder unit. It was decided to tune and assemble it at the AMG sports division; they knew a thing or two about tuning such super-powerful engines. The 12 cylinders, supplemented by turbochargers, produced 550 horsepower, and later a full 600 horsepower with nearly 900 Newton-meters of torque. Why so much power for a representative car? So that there would be a reserve under the pedal—that's roughly how the Maybach engineers explained it later.