Maybach Rental in Los Angeles: One Car, and What the Badge Buys

There is one Maybach in this garage and it is an SUV. Maybach stopped being a marque in 2012; what the word means today is the tier above Mercedes-Benz, and the car it points at here is the GLS 600.

Almost every page that ranks for this question shows a long black saloon. That is the honest source of the confusion, because the saloon and the SUV are completely different vehicles sharing a name, and the one people picture is usually not the one they end up wanting. A saloon is a car you sit in. The GLS 600 is a car you can also put four suitcases and a garment bag into, which in a city built around an airport turns out to matter.

What follows is what the badge actually denotes, what it buys over the Mercedes it is built from, where it sits against a Cullinan, and what a day of it costs once everything is counted. Rates for the whole tier are on the Maybach rate page, and the car has its own page with live dates.

What “Maybach” actually means in 2026

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 the badge then sat unused for four decades. It came back in 2002 as a standalone ultra-luxury marque with its own cars, 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 marque of its own — a top tier applied to specific Mercedes models, the way AMG is a tier applied from the other direction. So the correct answer to “is a Maybach 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.

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 the four-seat cabin — or a three-across bench if you want five. Car and Driver, who have tested one, rate those rear seats against the best first-class airline cabins, and note that 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 honest cost of all this is luggage. Because the rear seats are fixed and do not fold, the boot is smaller than a standard GLS's — around eighteen to nineteen cubic feet behind the second row, which took five carry-on cases in Car and Driver's testing. That is plenty for four people arriving from a flight and not enough for a family moving house. It is the one specification on this car worth checking against your actual day.

The half of the Maybach range that is not in this garage

Two other Maybachs exist and neither is here, which is worth stating plainly because most of the pages you have already read are showing you one of them.

• The Maybach S-Class saloon. The long-wheelbase four-door is the car the word conjures, and it is the car most listings for this search actually picture. It is not in this garage in any specification. If the brief behind it is “a long, quiet car with the best seat in the back”, the GLS 600 answers it and takes the luggage the saloon would leave on the pavement.
• The Maybach EQS SUV. The electric one. Also not here, and worth knowing exists so you are not surprised by a photograph of a Maybach with no grille.
• The Bentley Flying Spur is the cross-shop people run against the saloon rather than against the SUV. It is not in this garage either; the Bentley that is, is the Bentayga, which is an SUV and therefore the fairer comparison anyway.

The same logic covers the Mercedes S-Class, which is the most-searched Mercedes we do not hold. There is no S-Class in this fleet. If the point of it was the arrival, the GLS 600 is the car; if the point was the badge at a sane number, the AMG GLE 53 at $229/day does most of the same work at an eighth of the rate. The whole range is laid out in which Mercedes to book in Los Angeles.

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 at $2,500/day is a louder statement in every sense except engine noise. Rear-hinged coach doors, a V12, and a badge that stops conversation. The Maybach GLS 600 at $1,799/day is the more comfortable car to spend two hours in the back of and the less conspicuous one to arrive in, which for some bookings is the feature and for others is the flaw. 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 at $1,299/day belongs in it too, and the three separate on the second row rather than on anything you would find in a performance table. That is Cullinan vs Bentayga vs Maybach GLS.

What a day of it actually costs

The rate is $1,799/day for twenty-four hours, and it is the dearest single line in this garage after the Rolls-Royces. Four things sit outside it, and all four are in the quote before you pay:

• A refundable security deposit, in the top band. It is held rather than spent and it comes back 5–7 business days after the car does.
• Damage-and-liability cover, mandatory and priced per day by that deposit band. On this car it is the highest band we run, which is what a two-hundred-thousand-dollar SUV costs to stand behind.
• Los Angeles County sales tax at 9.75%.
• A young-driver fee if the primary driver is under twenty-five. On a car in this deposit band it is $175/day rather than the $50/day the standard cars carry — the threshold is a deposit of $1,500 or more, and this one is well above it.

One thing to know before you plan a week rather than a day, because nobody else will tell you: this car carries no weekly or monthly block rate. The quote engine takes whichever combination of daily, five-day and twenty-one-day blocks is cheapest across your dates, and on the GLS 600 there are no block rates to choose from — so five days costs five days. That is not a policy, it is what the fleet record says, and pretending otherwise would produce a number we could not honour. Send the dates and the total comes back the same day. Everything else lives in the terms and conditions.

The one arrival this car is built for

Collection from Robertson costs nothing, and delivery to our partner hotels in Beverly Hills is complimentary. The airport is the exception, and it is priced in two tiers, each way.

The $75 tier leaves the car in the airport parking structure and you ride the shuttle out to collect it, which adds roughly half an hour to the end of a flight. The $150 tier brings the car to the terminal, where somebody is standing beside it with the doors open. They combine per direction: $150 for the parking structure both ways, $300 for the terminal both ways, or $225 for the terminal on arrival and the parking structure on the way home, which is what most people choose.

If there is one car in this fleet where the higher tier is not an indulgence, it is this one. The entire proposition of a Maybach GLS 600 is the twenty minutes between the aircraft door and the hotel forecourt. Spending half an hour of that on a shuttle bus with your luggage, to reach a car built around a reclining rear seat, is a strange way to arrange an evening. Our full breakdown of both tiers is in the airport delivery guide.

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 thing 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, because the driver's hours are their own line rather than a mark-up hidden inside the car's — see chauffeur service and say so when you enquire rather than on the morning.

Self-drive is perfectly normal too, and the car is easy: it is a big SUV with good visibility, air suspension and cameras on every corner. It is simply that you have then booked the second-best seat.

The Maybach in the fleet, with live dates → Every luxury SUV we keep →