#HTE
The Maybe Maybach: Mercedes Might Be Working on a 20-Foot-Long Car
Mercedes-Benz is teasing the following image on their Facebook page:
The only description they’ve provided is “Hot & cool - almost 6 metres of ultimate luxury.” Six meters is 19.7 feet, so this thing is apparently going to be about as long as a 1976 Cadillac Fleetwood.
As for what it is, they’re not doing a good job of keeping it a secret; downloading the image reveals the filename “maybach_concept_coupe_1.jpg.” Commenters instantly drew comparisons to the Maybach Exelero, a 5.8-meter long one-off coupe built in 2004 for Fulda Tires. The Exelero was fully-functional and featured a 700-horsepower twin-turbo V12.
Fulda (a German subsidiary of Goodyear) commissioned the car to test their next-generation tires and serve as a showpiece. It did indeed: Jay-Z borrowed and featured the car in his 2006 music video for “Lost One.”
In 2011 it was rumored that Birdman (the rapper, not the cartoon superhero) purchased the Exelero for a whopping eight million dollars, but apparently he never finalized the deal nor took possession of the car.
The German website Motorvision reports that the Exelero is currently in the possession of Mechatronik GmbH, a German company specializing in the restoration of classic Mercedes automobiles. Motorvision also revealed this interesting tidbit: The car was designed not by Maybach staff, but design students at the University of Pforzheim! eMercedesBenz provides more detail on the design team:
[The Exelero design team was] headed by Prof. Harald Leschke [and consisted of] two professors and four students from the Transportation Design department of Pforzheim Technical College. Nine months later, the draft of one of the students was selected for realization from a line-up of promising design proposals. This student had succeeded in creating the most elegant symbiosis of the related form languages of past and present car generations.
Sadly, none of the students’ names are mentioned anywhere. We’d have guessed the final student to be Daniel Simon–we interviewed the guy (“From Bugatti to Hollywood”) and he went to Pforzheim–but it turns out Simon graduated in 2001, and the Exelero project was started in 2003.
It drives me nuts when designers are not given credit. The teaser rendering up top is also completely uncredited. Here’s to hoping the designer[s] eventually get some freaking recognition!
http://www.core77.com/posts/55517/The-Maybe-Maybach-Mercedes-Might-Be-Working-on-a-20-Foot-Long-Car