The Kim Kardashian Maybach GLS 600: What the Car Actually Is

This is a page about a car. The Maybach behind that search is the GLS 600 — the SUV, not the long black saloon nearly every page about the word “Maybach” actually shows you.

People type a name and a badge together because the badge is the part they cannot identify. That is the whole of the question, and it has a factual answer that takes about four minutes to read.

Why the answer is an SUV when every listing shows a saloon

Maybach is not a separate manufacturer. It is the tier above Mercedes-Benz, applied to a handful of specific models, and it currently covers a long-wheelbase saloon, an electric SUV and the GLS 600. The saloon is the one photographed on almost every page that uses the word, because it is the oldest and the most obvious, and it is not the car in most people's heads when they picture a Maybach in Los Angeles.

The car in their heads is a tall silver-or-two-tone SUV with chrome down the sills and wheels the size of dinner tables. That is the GLS 600, and the reason it reads as a different species from a normal Mercedes SUV is that it more or less is one: the third row has been taken out and the space given to the two people in the second row. Longer version of that argument in what a Maybach actually is.

How to tell a Maybach GLS from a GLS at twenty feet

This is the practical part, and it is what somebody searching a car by association is usually trying to do. Four tells, in the order you will spot them.

• The grille. A standard GLS wears a mesh or a set of horizontal bars. The Maybach wears fine vertical chrome slats with the word MAYBACH written across the top of them, inside the grille rather than on the bodywork. It is unmistakable once you have seen it and invisible until you have.
• The wheels. Twenty-three inches, and the tyres are wider at the back than the front. Nothing else in the GLS range sits on wheels that size.
• The paint. Two-tone is a factory option and an expensive one — Car and Driver's tested car carried an eighteen-and-a-half-thousand-dollar silver-over-black split. Ours is a single silver, which is the commoner spec and the one that photographs more consistently.
• The sill. A polished chrome running board along the bottom of the doors, which exists because the car is tall and somebody in the back is expected to step down from it rather than jump.

The badge on the bonnet is still the three-pointed star. The double-M sits on the rear quarter and on the boot lid. If you see the star at the front and the double-M at the back, you are looking at the same car in the photographs.

What is different once the doors close

The cabin is the product. Car and Driver's test of the GLS 600 puts the rear seats level with the best first-class airline cabins, and lists the things Mercedes will sell you to go in the back of one: a refrigerated rear console, holders for champagne flutes, folding tables, rear entertainment screens. Heat and massage come in both rows rather than only behind.

Under all of it is a 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 making 550 horsepower through all four wheels, on air suspension with a Maybach setting that takes the edges off whatever the driver is doing. The one honest limitation is luggage: the rear seats are fixed and do not fold, so the boot behind them took five carry-on cases in Car and Driver's testing. Four people arriving from a flight, comfortably. A house move, no.

What the car actually does here

Nobody books a GLS 600 to drive it, and that is not a criticism of how it drives. They book it for the twenty minutes between an aircraft door and a hotel forecourt, or between a hotel and a venue, with somebody else holding the keys. It is executive transport with an unusually good badge, and every feature listed above points the same way: the best seat in the car is behind the driver.

Two practical consequences. First, airport delivery is worth paying up for on this one specifically — $75 leaves the car in the parking structure for you to shuttle out to, and $150 brings it to the terminal with somebody standing beside it. On a car built around a reclining rear seat, spending half an hour on a shuttle bus to reach it is an odd way to start the evening. The two tiers are set out in our airport delivery guide.

Second, ask about a driver when you send the dates rather than afterwards. A chauffeured day is quoted separately from the daily rate rather than folded into it — see chauffeur service. The car is $1,799/day self-drive, it takes a deposit in the top band that comes back 5–7 business days after the car does, and under twenty-five the young-driver fee on a car in this band is $175/day rather than the $50/day the standard fleet carries.

If the arrival is the point, there are two others

The GLS 600 is not the only car here built around its back seat, and it is not automatically the right one. The Rolls-Royce Cullinan at $2,500/day is the louder statement and has rear-hinged coach doors, which change how getting out of it looks. The Bentley Bentayga at $1,299/day is the one nobody photographs, which for some evenings is the entire brief.

All three separate on the second row rather than on anything you would find in a performance table, and that comparison is its own piece: Cullinan vs Bentayga vs Maybach GLS.

The Maybach in the fleet, with live dates →