Value
The Most Expensive Mercedes Ever Made
The most expensive Mercedes ever sold is a 1955 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé, at €135 million — about $142 million — at RM Sotheby's on 5 May 2022. That is the highest price ever paid for any car at auction, from any marque. The dearest Mercedes anyone will hand you the keys to in Los Angeles is a Maybach GLS 600.
| Mercedes | Figure | What kind of number that is |
|---|---|---|
| 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé, 1955 | €135,000,000 | RM Sotheby's, 5 May 2022. Two built. The record for any car. |
| W196 R Stromlinienwagen, 1954 | €51,155,000 | RM Sotheby's, February 2025. Second-dearest car ever auctioned. |
| AMG ONE, 2022–2025 | $2,720,000 | List price. 275 built, production finished. |
| Maybach S 680, 2027 | not yet published | Sticker. Mercedes' own configurator says so today. |
| Maybach GLS 600 | $1,799/day | What the dearest Mercedes in our garage actually costs. |
One question that is really three
Ask for the most expensive Mercedes and you get an auction result, a discontinued list price and a showroom sticker, all sorted into one column as though they were the same kind of thing. They are not, and the gap between the top two is a hundred and forty million dollars.
An auction result is a transaction that provably happened, with a house, a date and a buyer's premium attached. A list price is what the factory asked, which is a different claim: nobody may have paid it, and in the case of a car built in numbers of two hundred and seventy-five, almost nobody could. A showroom sticker is the softest of the three, because it changes every model year and the options list moves it a long way.
So the columns stay apart here, each figure says which kind it is, and the one Mercedes you can drive out of our Mercedes fleet this weekend is named where it belongs rather than saved for the end. It is not in the ranking. Nothing in the ranking is rentable anywhere on earth.
The record, and the part almost every list gets wrong
On 5 May 2022, inside the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, a 1955 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé sold for €135,000,000 — the figure RM Sotheby’s published itself, for a sale it conducted on behalf of Mercedes-Benz. It beat the previous record for a car at auction by more than ninety-five million dollars, which is not a margin so much as a different category. The proceeds established the Mercedes-Benz Fund, a scholarship programme, and the buyer bid on behalf of a client who has never been named.
The car is a closed-roof version of the racing 300 SLR, built around a 2,982cc straight-eight making 310 PS at 7,400 rpm, and capable of approaching 180 mph at a time when that was the fastest anything road-legal went. Two were made. Rudolf Uhlenhaut, Daimler-Benz's engineering chief, kept one as his company car after Mercedes left motorsport — which is the detail that makes the story, because it means the most valuable car in the world spent part of its life as somebody's commute.
Here is what the listicles miss. In February 2025 a 1954 W196 R Stromlinienwagen sold, also at RM Sotheby's and also in Stuttgart, for €51,155,000 — $53,917,370. That makes the two most expensive cars ever sold at public auction both Mercedes, first and second, with a Ferrari third. Almost every ranking of "most expensive Mercedes" published before 2025 lists one of them and stops.
Two rules, because they are where these lists break
A hammer price is not a list price. One is what somebody paid on a specific afternoon with a premium on top. The other is what a factory printed. Sorting them into one column produces a ranking where a 1955 racing car and a 2027 saloon appear to be competing, which they are not.
The number belongs to a car, not to a badge. Every row above names a model year and a variant. "The most expensive Mercedes" nearly always means the most expensive version of a nameplate, and the two get swapped constantly.
The most expensive Mercedes anybody could order new
Set the auctions aside and ask what the factory has charged the most for, and the answer is the AMG ONE, at $2.72 million. It ran from August 2022 to 2025, 275 were built, and every one was sold before the first was delivered.
What makes it worth the paragraph is the engine, which is not a road-car engine adapted for the road. It is a 1.6-litre V6 from a Formula One power unit, with four electric motors around it, making 1,049 horsepower combined. Cars like this normally borrow the idea of a racing engine. This one borrowed the engine.
It is also finished. Production ended, the run sold out, and the only ONEs changing hands now go privately at figures well above the original list. So the honest phrasing of the sticker record is past tense: the most expensive Mercedes the factory ever listed, not the most expensive one a person can order today.
What is the most expensive Mercedes on sale today?
This is the question most people are actually asking, and it currently has no publishable answer — which is itself the finding.
The car is the Maybach S 680, the top of the Maybach S-Class range, and on the day this was written Mercedes-Benz USA's own page for the 2027 car reads Price Coming Soon against both the S 580 and the S 680. Every precise dollar figure circulating for "the most expensive Mercedes you can buy" is therefore one of three things: last year's number, a dealer's asking price, or a guess. Several sites carry figures around seventy thousand dollars apart from each other, which is what happens when nobody says which model year or which source they mean.
We are not going to add a fourth number to that pile. When Mercedes publishes the 2027 band we will put it in this table with the date attached, and until then the row says what is true: not yet published.
The most expensive Mercedes in Los Angeles
None of the cars above exists in any rental fleet on earth. There are two Uhlenhaut Coupés, the AMG ONE run is finished and privately held, and a Maybach S 680 is not something anybody in this city puts on a daily rate.
What does exist is a ladder, and the top of ours is the Maybach GLS 600 at $1,799/day. Below it sit the AMG G 63 at $1,099/day and the G 550 at $899/day, both of which people ask for by name more often than the Maybach and neither of which is the dearest thing here. Then a long gap, and the AMG GT43 and AMG GLE 53 share $229/day, which is where the Mercedes fleet stops being an occasion and starts being a car.
That spread is the useful thing to know, and it is roughly seventeen to one from top to bottom. It is also the reason the question "how much is the most expensive Mercedes" and the question "what should I book" almost never have the same answer.
What it costs, and how it reaches you
The Maybach GLS 600 carries a $2,000 refundable deposit, which comes back 5–7 business days after the car does. Multi-day and monthly blocks exist and the quote picks them when they genuinely beat the days they cover, so the rate to trust is the one on the car's own page rather than a figure typed here in September.
Collection from our lot on Robertson Boulevard is free, and delivery to the partner hotels in Beverly Hills is complimentary. Airport delivery is priced in two tiers, per direction: $75 standard, where we leave the car in the airport parking structure and you take the shuttle out to it, and $150 VIP, where the car is waiting at the terminal. They combine per direction. The mileage allowance and the per-mile rate charged past it are both written into your rental agreement. The rest is in the terms.
The short version, with the columns kept apart
The most expensive Mercedes ever sold is the 1955 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé at €135 million, and it is also the most expensive car of any marque ever sold at auction. Second place in that same all-time list is another Mercedes, the W196 R, at €51.2 million.
The most expensive one the factory ever listed is the AMG ONE at $2.72 million, 275 built, finished in 2025. The most expensive one on sale today is the Maybach S 680, whose 2027 price Mercedes has not published yet — so nobody quoting a precise figure for it can tell you where they got it.
And the most expensive Mercedes in Los Angeles is a Maybach GLS 600, which is in our garage rather than in a museum.
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Frequently asked questions
What is the most expensive Mercedes ever made?
By the only number that records a transaction, a 1955 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupe, which sold for 135 million euros at RM Sotheby's in Stuttgart on 5 May 2022. That is about $142 million and it is the highest price ever paid at auction for a car of any marque, not just a Mercedes. Two were built.
What is the most expensive Mercedes you can buy new?
The Maybach S 680, at the top of the Maybach S-Class range. There is no reliable dollar figure to give for it right now: Mercedes-Benz USA's own configurator lists the 2027 S 680 as Price Coming Soon, and the figures circulating elsewhere differ from one another by tens of thousands of dollars because they cite different model years without saying so.
Are the two most expensive cars ever sold really both Mercedes?
Yes, and it is recent. The 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupe took first place in May 2022 at 135 million euros, and a 1954 W196 R Stromlinienwagen took second in February 2025 at EUR 51,155,000, or $53,917,370. A Ferrari sits third. Most rankings written before 2025 name only the first and are now out of date.
How much was the Mercedes-AMG ONE?
$2.72 million, and 275 were built between August 2022 and 2025. It used a 1.6-litre V6 taken from a Formula One power unit with four electric motors around it, for 1,049 horsepower combined. The run is finished and sold out, so it is the most expensive Mercedes the factory ever listed rather than the most expensive one available today.
Which Mercedes can you rent in Los Angeles?
Eleven of them, from the CLA and GLA up to a Maybach GLS 600 at $1,799/day, with an AMG G 63 and a G 550 between. None of the cars in the ranking above is rentable anywhere, and we would rather you read that here than find it out on the phone.