LUX Correspondent Annie Preston with the Mercedes-Maybach S-class
LUX’s Annie Preston swaps her chic little Mini for 5.3 meters of rolling serenity in the form of a Mercedes-Maybach S-class
I drive a Mini convertible. It is small, it is nippy, it is the sort of car you can park anywhere in London if you squint hard enough and believe in yourself. So, when I was invited to the media launch of the new Mercedes-Maybach S-Class, I felt a bit like a Shetland pony owner being handed the reins of a Grand National winner. What, exactly, was I meant to do with all this car?
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The answer, as it turns out, is very little, and that is precisely the point. The Maybach asks you to occupy it. Sliding into the rear cabin for the first time, doors closing themselves with a soft, ceremonial hush, I understood immediately that this was not a car built for me to do anything to it. It was built for it to do things for me.
The Mercedes-Maybach S 680 runs on a V-eight-cylinder engine, producing 450 kilowatts and 850 newton metres
Which brings me to the horsepower, because one must be responsible. Under the bonnet of the range-topping Mercedes-Maybach S 680 sits a newly evolved V-eight-cylinder engine producing 450 kilowatts and 850 newton metres plus 205 newton metres, numbers that mean, in practice, that this cocoon of calm, roughly the weight of a small elephant, can still put a smug little Porsche in its mirrors if the mood takes it.
There is even, in selected markets, a V12 still on offer for those who consider eight cylinders a personal insult. My Mini, for context, has four cylinders and an opinion about speed bumps. The Maybach simply does not acknowledge that speed bumps exist.
LUX correspondent Annie Preston with the Mercedes-Maybach S 680
The launch took place along the rolling hills of the Côte d’Azur, which felt right for a car that seems to regard tarmac as more of a polite suggestion than a surface. There was a moment, somewhere between one sun-soaked bend and the next, where the road dipped, and the Maybach simply absorbed it, not so much driving as gliding, the faintest bounce underneath us like a boat easing over a gentle swell rather than a car meeting the road at all. I will say nothing else of the day itself, other than it involved a great deal of sitting very still, gliding along as if on water, and being thoroughly content about it.
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Inside, the Maybach cocooning effect, Mercedes’ own term, and one I now use unprompted in conversation, is achieved through a small orchestra of materials. There is newly available leather-free upholstery, including a high-grade “Mirville” textile, paired with deep white piping and open quilted diamond stitching, which felt suspiciously like sitting inside a very expensive cloud.
The interior of the Mercedes-Maybach S 680 is described by Mercedes as “cocooning”
Open-pore oak trims the centre console; the rear seats come with their own climate zones, their own screens, their own small kingdom of buttons, which I did not touch for fear of accidentally ejecting myself. Silver-plated Robbe & Berking champagne flutes sit in bespoke holders behind the rear armrest, kept perfectly chilled by a dedicated refrigerated compartment, a detail so unnecessary, so gloriously over-engineered, that I found myself rather moved by it.
Ambient lighting shifts through 199 LEDs and 64 individually selectable colours, including a rose-gold hue that appears, rather charmingly, to have been invented specifically to flatter the Maybach badge on the steering wheel. The new MBUX Superscreen glows beneath the dash like something from a very tasteful spaceship, and the whole cabin hums with the sense that someone, somewhere, has thought about this rather harder than is strictly necessary, which, in the world of Maybach, is rather the entire point.
Annie Preston took the Mercedes-Maybach S 680 for the ultimate ride through the hills of Côte d’Azur
This is a throne room on wheels, endlessly considerate of the person sitting in the back, that our readers will always find themselves in, whether gliding to a gallery opening or being delivered, unhurried and unruffled, to dinner. I was simply testing it out on their behalf.
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I may not be trading in my Mini anytime soon. But I will admit that reversing out of the car park afterwards, back to my small, cheerful convertible, felt for one brief moment rather like stepping out of a Luxury hotel suite and back into a rather charming tent.
