Cullinan vs Bentayga vs Maybach GLS: The Back-Seat Question

Second row	Figure	What kind of number that is
Rear door	coach / conventional / conventional	Cullinan, Bentayga, Maybach. Only the Cullinan’s opens backwards.
Rear seat reclines	Maybach only	Two power recliners where the GLS’s third row used to be.
Rear seats fold	Cullinan, Bentayga	The Maybach’s are fixed. There is no expanding the boot.
Boot behind row two	21 cu ft / SUV / 18–19 cu ft	Cullinan, Bentayga, Maybach. Car and Driver fitted five carry-ons in the Maybach.
Reads from twenty feet as	event / SUV / Mercedes	Until the Maybach’s grille comes into focus.
Deposit	$2,000	The same refundable hold on all three, back 5–7 business days after return.

The doors are the argument Rolls-Royce Cullinan Rear-hinged coach doors, twenty-one cubic feet, and the rear seats fold. Somehow both the most theatrical and the most practical of the three. Dates and rate →

The second row is the only column that separates them

Three ultra-luxury SUVs, five seats each, and every performance figure close enough to be irrelevant. The only column that separates them is the second row.

So this piece has a narrow job. If you are the one driving — if the question is which is quickest, loudest or best on a canyon road — that argument is already written, and the Bentayga appears in it alongside a Urus and a G 63 in the super-SUV comparison. Nothing below quotes a 0–60 time, because a 0–60 time has never once decided which of these three somebody should book. And if the question underneath is really Rolls-Royce against Rolls-Royce, that is a different piece, with the whole marque here.

Two rows in the table above decide almost every booking, and neither is a number. The rear door decides what the arrival looks like. Whether the rear seats fold decides whether the luggage fits. Everything else is preference.

The Cullinan: the doors are the argument

The rear doors of a Cullinan are hinged at the back. That sounds like trivia and it is the whole car. You do not swing your legs out sideways and stand up; the aperture opens ahead of you and you step out facing where you are going, which is why every photograph of somebody arriving in one looks composed rather than athletic. In a dress, or in anything with structure, it is the difference between an entrance and a manoeuvre. The front doors are conventional, so valets already know what to do with it.

Behind those doors is a bench rather than a pair of thrones — wide, deeply upholstered, heated, cooled, massaging — and it is a bench on both of ours. If you are picturing two separated seats with a console between them, the car that gives you that is the Maybach. A coach door wants room to swing, so tell us the address when you enquire and the car stops where the door opens fully.

The Maybach GLS 600: the only one that reclines

The Maybach GLS 600 is the only one of the three that was engineered backwards from the passenger. Mercedes took a three-row, seven-seat GLS, deleted the third row outright, and gave the space to the two people behind the driver. Car and Driver, who have tested one, put the resulting rear seats level with the best first-class airline cabins: two power-adjustable recliners with heat and massage in the four-seat cabin, or a three-across bench if you need five.

Neither of the other two reclines. That is the sentence this whole article exists to deliver. A Cullinan’s bench and a Bentayga’s rear seats are excellent places to sit upright; the Maybach is the only one in which somebody can genuinely lie back between the hotel and the venue, and on a run to Palm Springs or up to Santa Barbara that is not a small difference. What it costs is the boot, and we will come back to that.

The Bentayga: the one nobody photographs

The Bentayga does the least to announce itself and that is precisely the reason it goes out. Ours is black on black. From twenty feet it reads as an expensive SUV rather than as an event, and there are evenings — a private dinner, a client, a person who does not want the arrival on anybody’s phone — where that is the entire specification.

Inside it is the most conventionally excellent of the three: the quietest at freeway speed, the most settled over the broken tarmac that covers half this city, and the best materials of the three by most people’s reckoning. Rear doors open conventionally, and Bentley builds the standard-wheelbase car in 4-seat, 4+1 and 5-seat configurations, so what is behind the front seats varies from car to car.

Ours is the standard-wheelbase Bentayga: a superb, quiet SUV for the driver and four passengers. For a reclining rear seat, the Maybach is the car to book. What Bentayga means, and how this car sits against the Bentleys that cost twenty times as much, is its own page.

Luggage, with everybody actually in the car

Luggage decides a good many bookings. The Cullinan has twenty-one cubic feet behind the rear seats, and the seats fold: four adults and a genuine week of luggage, no negotiation, which is a strange thing to write about a Rolls-Royce and is nonetheless true. The Bentayga has a conventional SUV boot with folding rear seats; four people and their bags is routine, and the exact figure for our car moves with its seat configuration, so we give it on request.

The Maybach has around eighteen to nineteen cubic feet and — this is the part — the rear seats are fixed and do not fold. Car and Driver fitted five carry-on cases behind the second row. That is four people arriving from a flight, comfortably. It is not four people with hold luggage and a garment bag.

So the car that is best to sit in is the worst to pack, and the car with the most theatrical doors takes the most bags. If the day has an airport at one end of it and four people with real suitcases, that is not a preference question any more. The general form of the trade — certified belts against the boot behind the last occupied row — is worked out across the whole fleet.

Who owns Bentley, Rolls-Royce and Maybach today

Three badges, three German parents, and one shared history. Bentley belongs to the Volkswagen Group, which bought it on 3 July 1998 together with the Crewe factory where every Bentayga is built (Volkswagen Group). Rolls-Royce Motor Cars belongs to the BMW Group: BMW acquired the Rolls-Royce name and badge on 28 July 1998, the rights took effect on 1 January 2003, and the first Goodwood-built Phantom was handed over at one minute past midnight that morning (Rolls-Royce Motor Cars). Maybach is a Mercedes-Benz sub-brand, Mercedes-Maybach, established in 2014 and on sale from 2015, which is why the GLS 600 is a Mercedes underneath and a Maybach in the back (Mercedes-Benz Group).

Bentley and Rolls-Royce were one company for sixty-seven years. Rolls-Royce bought Bentley out of receivership in November 1931, for £125,275, and from then on the two marques shared factories, engines and, for long stretches, entire cars with different grilles. The split came in 1998: Vickers, which owned Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, sold the business to Volkswagen, but the Rolls-Royce name belonged to the aero-engine company, which licensed it to BMW instead. Volkswagen kept Bentley and Crewe; BMW built a new factory at Goodwood and took over Rolls-Royce cars from 2003. That is why the Cullinan and the Bentayga, cousins for most of the twentieth century, now arrive from two different countries’ worth of engineering, and why the Maybach has nothing to do with either.

What it costs, and how it reaches you

All three sit in the top deposit band: a $2,000 refundable hold, held rather than charged, back 5–7 business days after the car returns. The Protection plan is priced per day by that band and shown in the quote; under 25 the young-driver fee is the higher of the two we charge. None of the three carries a weekly or monthly block rate, so five days costs five days, and the live rate is on each car’s own page — the Bentayga is the least of the three and the Cullinan nearly double it. The rest of the small print is in the terms.

Collection from our lot on Robertson Boulevard is free and delivery to the partner hotels in Beverly Hills is complimentary. Airport delivery is $150 both ways standard, where the car waits in the airport parking structure and you take the shuttle out to it, or $300 both ways VIP, where it is waiting at the terminal when you walk out — half that for one direction. Every one of these three is booked for the way it looks when it stops somewhere, and a shuttle bus is not part of that; the airport delivery guide breaks both tiers down.