What Is a Maybach? The Badge, the GLS 600, and What It Buys

What the badge means	Figure	What kind of number that is
Maybach today	a sub-brand since 2015	Founded 1909, a standalone marque 2002–2012, then absorbed. Not a manufacturer.
What it deletes	the third row	A seven-seat GLS becomes four seats, or five on a bench. The recliners do not fold.
Power	550 hp	4.0-litre twin-turbo V8, 48-volt starter-generator, all four wheels.
Wheels	23 in	Nothing else in the GLS range sits on wheels that size.
Boot	5 carry-on cases	Car and Driver’s test: four people off a flight.
Rate	$1,799/day	$2,000 refundable deposit. No weekly or monthly block on this car: five days costs five days.

The one Maybach in this garage Mercedes-Maybach GLS 600 Silver, on 23-inch wheels, one of one. The calendar fills from the weekends inwards, so settle the date before anything else. Dates and rate →

Maybach stopped being a marque in 2012

The name is older than almost anything else on a Los Angeles forecourt. Wilhelm Maybach and his son Karl founded the company in 1909; Daimler-Benz bought it in 1960 and left the badge unused for four decades.

It came back in 2002 as a standalone ultra-luxury marque with cars of its own, sold badly, and the last standalone Maybach was built in December 2012. What exists now is a different thing with the same name: since 2015, Maybach has been a sub-brand of Mercedes-Benz rather than a manufacturer, a top tier applied to specific Mercedes models. So the answer to whether a Maybach is a Mercedes is yes, and the interesting follow-up is which Mercedes.

One fact that surprises people who assume Stuttgart: the GLS 600 has been built in Vance, Alabama since September 2020, on the same site as the rest of the big Mercedes SUVs. The most exclusive German SUV on Sunset Boulevard is an American-built car. The rest of the range, from the CLA up, is set out in which Mercedes is best to rent; the Maybach is the last line of it and the only one that is not really a Mercedes decision.

The same two recliners, a foot higher, with the luggage

Three Maybachs exist today: the long-wheelbase S-Class saloon, the electric Maybach EQS SUV with no grille, and the GLS 600, which is the one here and the one that takes four people and their luggage. For a Bentley alongside it, the Bentayga is here too, the discreet one of the pair.

The confusion costs people the right car. A saloon is something you sit in. The GLS 600 is something you can also put four suitcases and a garment bag into, which in a city built around an airport turns out to matter. If the brief behind the saloon was “a long, quiet car with the best seat in the back”, the SUV answers it and takes the luggage the saloon would leave on the pavement.

The same logic covers the Mercedes S-Class: if the point was the arrival, this is the car.

What the badge buys over the GLS underneath it

Start with what is taken away, because that is the actual engineering decision. A standard Mercedes-Benz GLS is a three-row, seven-seat SUV. The Maybach version deletes the third row entirely and gives the space to the two people in the second one. Everything else follows from that.

What goes in instead: two power-adjustable reclining rear seats, heated and with massage, in a four-seat cabin, or a three-across bench if you want five. Both rows get heat and massage rather than just the back one. The mechanical half is a 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 with a 48-volt starter-generator making 550 horsepower through all four wheels, on air suspension with a Maybach setting that quietly smooths out whatever the driver is doing with the pedals. The cabin is the quietest thing we keep.

The rear seats are fixed recliners, so the boot is its own space: around eighteen to nineteen cubic feet behind the second row, which took five carry-on cases in Car and Driver’s testing — plenty for four people arriving from a flight. The general form of the question — how many people really fit once the boot behind them is counted — runs right across the fleet.

Against a Cullinan, which is also here

This is the comparison people actually want, and it has a short answer and a long one. The short answer: the Rolls-Royce Cullinan is a louder statement in every sense except engine noise. Rear-hinged coach doors, a V12, and a badge that stops conversation. The GLS 600 is the more comfortable car to spend two hours in the back of and the less conspicuous one to arrive in, which for many bookings is exactly the point. The Cullinan’s rear bench folds and the Maybach’s does not, so on luggage the Rolls wins.

The long answer runs to a whole article, because the Bentley Bentayga belongs in it too — the discreet one of the three, and 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 is Cullinan vs Bentayga vs Maybach GLS.

Keys, or somebody else holding them

This is the car in the fleet most often booked with a driver, and it should be. The rear seats recline, the cabin is the quietest we keep, and the best seat is demonstrably not the one behind the wheel. A chauffeured day is arranged and quoted separately from the daily rate, with the driver’s hours as their own line — see chauffeur service and say so when you send the dates rather than on the morning.

Self-drive is perfectly normal too, and the car is easy: a big SUV with good visibility, air suspension and cameras on every corner. The car is as good to drive as it is to be driven in.

What it costs, and how it reaches you

The GLS 600 carries a $2,000 refundable deposit, the top band in the fleet, held rather than spent and back 5–7 business days after the car returns. The Protection plan is priced per day off that band, and Los Angeles County sales tax at 10.25% goes on the whole booking. Under twenty-five the young-driver fee is the higher of the two we charge, because the threshold is a deposit of $1,500 and this car is well above it. The live calendar and rate are on the GLS 600’s page.

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.

If there is one car in this fleet where the higher tier is not an indulgence, it is this one: spending half an hour on a shuttle bus to reach a car built around a reclining rear seat is a strange way to arrange an evening. The rest is in the terms.