Monterey Car Week is so overwhelming it isn’t even limited to a week. Across ten days, the Monterey peninsula stages no less than 80 automotive events and hosts the rarest cars and most committed petrolheads. The pretty towns of Carmel-on-Sea, Pacific Grove, and Pebble Beach become crammed with everything from pre-fall of the Berlin Wall BMWs and Elvis-era Cadillacs to Scandinavian small-batch hypercars and Japanese rice-rockets.
The event has been on the US social scene for seven decades, but it’s really only in the last ten years that European manufacturers have embraced it. This, you understand, is where the money is. The world’s most covetous car collectors are American, and many of them are based on the West Coast where the climate is kind to their sparkling, radiator-clad gems.
Monterey, familiar to TV viewers via Big Little Lies and bookworms from the prose of John Steinbeck, serves not only as a chance to witness automotive artworks you’re unlikely to see anywhere else, but also a half-billion-dollar salesroom for auction houses and a social event of serious one-upmanship.
Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance: a place to witness automotive artworks you’re unlikely to see anywhere else.
The grand finale is the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, where pre-war Bugattis and Mercedes-Benzes have been proclaimed ‘Best in Show’ a record ten times apiece. Mercedes has an official presence at the Concours, taking over one of the grandest rooms of the Pebble Beach Golf Club from which you can view the catwalk of cars. The three-pointed star brought a handful of classics and a fleet of shiny new Maybach limos for guests – including yours truly – to sample along the storied Pacific Coast Highway.
Mercedes also used the eve of the Concours as an opportunity to premiere its first-ever Maybach SL: an uber-luxe version of its elegant and erstwhile convertible. To mark the occasion, we were offered rides at Laguna Seca in a spectacularly vast and bellicose 1932 Maybach Zeppelin DS 8 – a three-tonne Teutonic titan of likely questionable provenance, given the period in which it was born. I’m not sure there’s anything more intimidating one might find filling one’s mirrors.
The big reveal: the first-ever Maybach SL.
Maybach was originally Germany’s attempt to build a car and a brand that could overshadow Rolls-Royce. Established 115 years ago and named after its founder, Wilhelm Maybach, it initially built engines for Zeppelin airships, before turning its attention to cars from 1921. Huge and stately, Maybachs combined every conceivable luxury with the very latest technology – right up until 1939 when it got into the tank business.
Daimler Benz bought the company in 1960 and revived the brand in 2002 with a luxury limo based on the W140 S-Class platform, which was beloved by Jay-Z and Kim Jong Un. Unfortunately, sales were a fraction of the similarly priced Rolls-Royce Phantom, and, in 2013, the brand was retired for a second time. However, in the last few years, it has been subsumed into regular Merc models, the S-Class, EQS SUV and GLS, denoting their most decadent specs with imposing grilles.
Maybach is gaining a foothold within the Mercedes group once again, and the car you see here – the Mercedes-Maybach SL 680 Monogram Series, to give it its full title – is the marque’s first two-seater ever. The SL that remains recognisable under all that extra lacquer and bling promises to be the frilliest SL ever and is easily distinguishable by its Maybach-specific grille and all the little double-M logos across its obsidian black paintwork and hood. They look a bit like cat footprints.
The Mercedes-Maybach SL 680 Monogram Series in garnet red.
A car of this prestige doesn’t come in ‘colours’; it comes in ‘ambiances.’ There are two available: the black is twinned with either garnet red or opalite white magno, colours created by Mercedes’ bespoke Manufaktur department. The soft top comes in black with Maybach logos, and the wheels look sensationally sophisticated: 21in polished five-spokes of a monolith style.
And whilst the specification is more demure and cushy than the sporty AMG-badged SLs, it possesses the same growly 577bhp engine as the AMG SL 63, which means it’ll surge from standing to 100km/h in 4.1 seconds. Towards the rear, there are double-scoop sculptured pieces behind the headrest in a nod to speedsters of the past.
Very demure: the opalite white magno ambiance.
The price has yet to be announced, but it’ll be around £250,000, putting it in competition with the likes of the new Bentley Continental GTC (£260,000), which is a dynamic yet refined masterpiece, and the Rolls-Royce Dawn (£300,000), which is the benchmark for craftsmanship and personalisation. Tough competition, that’s for sure. Whether the Maybach SL 68 is special enough to warrant the extra £140,000 over the base-spec Mercedes-AMG SL 43 is open to debate.
It will be the rarest of modern SLs, that’s for sure, and in a century’s time – alongside some ageing, creaking 2020s Dawns and Conti GTCs – maybe it’ll find its place on the fairway at the Pebble Beach Concours and be crowned ‘Best in Show.’
