Mercedes-Maybach GLS600 review: the ultimate in padded luxury

The Mercedes-Maybach GLS600 takes pampering to new heights.

Big boned: but it’ll hit 100km/h in just 4.9 seconds

Are the enormously rich actually made of different stuff to the rest of us? I mean, obviously their heads are wired differently, with the areas that light up in most humans’ brains when experiencing emotions like compassion, generosity and benevolence replaced entirely by big flashing lights saying “More” and “Me”. But I mean physically: are they, in fact, more fudge and blancmange than flesh and bone? This question is prompted by my experience in a Mercedes-Maybach GLS600, a luxury SUV so poshly plush that it seems to have been designed for humans with no skeleton.

Not only that, but the kind of people who are willing to spend an eye-watering $378,297 on what is, essentially, a Mercedes-Benz G-Class with Business Class rear seats and lush materials apparently struggle to step into a car without some mechanical help. For their benefit, it comes with some fabulous looking running boards that pop out of the side of the vehicle when you open the door to provide a kind of half-step to aid in your ingress (the car also lowers itself to make the whole lifting-your-foot-upwards effort easier).

The thing is, the steps end up so close to the ground that it seems almost pointless to use them for their intended purpose, and it’s far more tempting to just stand on them, grab hold of the roof, hold a period-piece machinegun and get someone to zoom you around, Bugsy Malone style.

The Mercedes-Maybach GLS600. Pictures: Newspress

Speaking of getting someone to drive you around, that is clearly what this Merc-bach (Maybach was a standalone German luxury brand at one point, and dates back to 1909, when no one knew what SUVs were) is designed for.

Honestly, and this is not a criticism, I have never wanted to drive a car less. The person who delivered the car to me put me in the back first and took me for a salubrious spin – after which I never wanted to get out.

I know that hangover cures don’t really exist, but the one I happened to have at the time ceased to bother me as I lay back on the reclining seat with its soft and downy head rest, hugging the soft and silky Maybach-monogrammed throw pillow to my chest. The silence was particularly soothing; this GLS600 has so much sound-deadening that after a while you fear you might have gone deaf. You can of course see life going on outside your vast windows – normal people with normal spines and non-pampered coccyxes – but you can’t hear them.

It’s the same with bumps and broken road surfaces, because the ride in the Maybach mega truck is so cosseting that they only seem to be affecting poor people in plebeian cars. Mercedes uses something called E-Active body control to do away with bumps, and there is even a chauffeur setting (which tells you all you need to know about who’s actually going to drive this car) that’s designed to optimise noise, vibration and harshness levels for the comfort of rear passengers.

From the outside

The problem with driving this thing is that while the front seats are undeniably lovely, they’re just nowhere near as comfortable as the big old beds in the rear – nor do you get a champagne fridge, TV screens, Bluetooth headsets or folding tables up front. On the plus side, the whole driving experience is inestimably effortless, thanks to a twin-turbo V8, which, teamed with the vehicle’s mild hybrid system, can make a hefty 426kW and 980Nm.

A nine-speed automatic gearbox designed entirely for silky smoothness also helps to make the road disappear under your enormous nose with minimal effort. The steering is light and easy, and if you find yourself running late for a meeting at which you’ll get to watch your children fighting over your succession plans, it can also really get up and boogie, particularly for something that weighs almost 2.8 tonnes. A 0-to-100km/h dash of 4.9 seconds might seem unseemly in a vehicle this large and stately, but it’s certainly amusing.

Those amazing rear seats

One of the other real joys about being inside this Maybach is not being able to see what it looks like from the outside. Our test vehicle was slathered in the most beautiful, pearlescent Emerald Green metallic paint, which seemed to dance before your eyes in the sunlight, but even that couldn’t make the car look good. It’s as if the American who came up with the idea of putting wood panels on the outside of vehicles was asked to draw what he thought European luxury should look like, with its enormous and otiose 23-inch wheels, its bluff and bourgeois grille and the kind of proportions that suggest it has spent too long at some kind of motoring buffet. And yet, when you get back inside again, you can almost forgive all of that, because it’s just so stupidly luxurious and calming in there.

This is what the chauffeur will see

Overall, the Maybach GLS600 feels like it was designed to give its owner the quietest, softest and easiest form of travel known to mankind. It is so obviously designed to be driven by someone else on your behalf that a chauffeur really should be included, or perhaps added to the price. Maybach owners could obviously afford it.

Mercedes-Maybach GLS600

ENGINE: 4.0-litre twin-turbocharged V8 (426kW/980Nm). Average fuel 12.5 litres per 100km

TRANSMISSION: Nine-speed automatic, all-wheel drive

PRICE: $378,297

STARS: 3.5 out of 5