The Mercedes Maybach debuted several years ago with some fanfare, as the uber car for wealthy people. It sells for around 300,000 to 400,000. IIRC It was meant to go head to head with the top end BMWs and Rolly Royce etc. super luxury cars.
Now I read this article that says it was a flop. Mercedes has always been pretty good at knowing their market. Where did they screw up?
Here’s their new $ 500,000 beast the Maybach Exelero. Will this car save the mark?
Maybe because the economy has been in the crapper for awhile?
Maybe because it is too expensive for the Average Joe to buy or even lust heavily for?
How many half-million dollar cars can [del]Mercedes[/del] Maybach really expect to sell? I’m thinking a couple per year is the absolute upper limit, with maybe one per year being a more realistic sales rate.
According to this cite, car sales are at a 4-year low. I think this slump hit the ultra-luxury car market harder than these companies expected. Apparently, Rolls-Royce has also been missing their sales figures. It seems like calling the Maybach a flop would be unfair
It looks too much a like a stretched Mercedes. For $300k, I would have expected something more distinctive.
Same thing with VW’s Phaeton. It looks too much like a stretched Passat.
I think it is because the Maybach website is too slow to load and too confusing to navigate. Rich people voted with their mouse.
They were expecting to sell about 500 a year.
I’ll go with that - not as a reason for the car’s demise, but merely as one of the best-ever examples of excruciatingly-bad website design.
As for the car - it looks like a big Rover. Not a good thing to spend six figures on. Simple Jeremy Clarkson
[quote]
(The Times & The Sunday Times):
Maybe the sales figures would improve if they offered the Employee Discount. What do you suppose the discount would be on a half million dollar car? The same two or three thousand. Can’t buy it at $500,000, but I can make it work at $497,000.
Let’s face it. Guys driving this obscenity ought to be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Why kill the chauffer? Grab the guy in the backseat making the multi-million dollar company-destroying deals.
I think the point to the Maybach is that it’s for ‘drivers’ - people who want the luxury of a Rolls, but don’t want a big ponderous boat. In other words, they drive it themselves.
I don’t think this thing is a big obscenity. The class of people this is aimed at is the class that can afford $75,000 a YEAR for a chauffer if they want one. Hell, for people in this group the Maybach is probably on one of a bunch of cars they have. It probably sits in the 12-car garage alongside the Ferrari, the Rolls, a classic roadster or two, the wife’s Land Rover and her Mercedes convertible, and the kid’s Porsche Boxter.
In that scheme of things, the Maybach is a reasonably affordable piece of executive transportation. Drive it yourself, and the payments for the entire car are probably less than the Chauffer’s salary would have been.
[QUOTE]
As for the car - it looks like a big Rover. Not a good thing to spend six figures on. Simple Jeremy Clarkson
That’s a hilarous article!
Well if that’s the case it’s obviously not aimed at upper-class established money, so we may just give the family a pass because he could have actually earned all that.
Recently sat at a stop light in my 94 Saturn SC2 and a Maybach pulled up next to me, and then it moved a few feet closer to the white line. I had a few minutes and a perfect view. I knew of the car, but it was the first time I had seen one, other than pictures on the web. The driver was a middle aged Asian fellow. The car was smaller than I expected and it kind of looked like a Jaguar. Nothing special.
You would think for the money the car costs I would have been salivating, or at least admiring the elegance and beauty of the machine. I wasn’t. It was just another car. I pulled up a little and felt just fine in my little Saturn, side by side with the Maybach, waiting at the red light.
The car just didn’t have “it”…whatever “it” is. It just didn’t have it.
Oddly, there are a couple to and from my route to work. They look nice, but all in all a car is just a car.
I did see a Maybach once on the streets in NYC. It was pretty cool looking.
Oh and
It had diplomatic plates.
I’ve never fully understood why spend all the time and engineering into making a car that expensive, when the major of the public just want a nice, affordable, reliable car that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.
Because if you sell 300 of those ( ten thou a pop) it equals the cost of one Maybach.
I think you may need to check your math again 
.
True, but when you consider the amenities the back seat offers, it could easily be a car for wealthy businessmen.
And maybe that’s the problem with the Maybach - it’s fundamentally schizoid. If a businessman wants a premium ‘driver’s luxury car’, why would he need champagne coolers in the back? And if he’s the type who can afford a Chauffer, perhaps the Maybach just isn’t ostentatious enough. Hard to say. I think it’s dangerous selling premium luxury stuff, because that market is very hard to define. It’s driven largely by things like status, prestige, fads, and other trappings of the very rich. In the lower prices, all you have to do is offer good looks and good value, and you’ll find a market. In the stratosphere of cars, not so much.
I’m someone who likes to drive and would not want a chauffer. If I could afford a $400,000 car, I wouldn’t buy a Maybach. I’d get the snarliest BMW or Mercedes AMG for less than half of that price.
