Maybach 6 Cabriolet Concept ‑ the most luxurious car at Pebble Beach

Super-luxury car wars are go! Last year Mercedes pushed its slowly-reviving Maybach brand to the fore during Monterey Car Week, wowing the Californian cognoscenti with the Vision 6 coupe concept.

This year it’s whipped off its head to make a convertible version. The message is clear: these may be concepts still, but Maybach wants a bigger slice of super-luxury action and it wants to get with more than just rebadged S-Classes.

As a coupe – with its massive gullwing doors and Art Deco-style split rear window – the Vision 6 was gloriously over the top. And as a Cabrio’? Well, you decide, but we reckon it makes the coupe appear a tad ordinary. This is a spectacular convertible car.

It’s still just as huge: 5.7m, or almost 19ft, and it’s still unashamedly yacht-like, the Cabrio's even more exaggerated boat-tail confirming the maritime allusion. There’s nothing to interrupt the flow of the body from stem to stern, a gently falling line that’s emphasised by what must surely be the world’s longest chrome trim strip. 

The doors are now conventional – though likely to be rearward-opening, like those of the R-R Wraith. Another old idea reprised is the two-piece centrally-hinged bonnet, as used by veteran Mercs and, more recently, by Rolls-Royce. 

Without the coupe’s trademark rear window – or any apparent hood – there’s just a bar-of-soap body that slides back to the tail, with a chrome strip that doubles as centre brake light at its centre. 

Despite its extreme length, the coupe’s vestigial rear seats have gone and the Cabrio is a strict two-seater. But what seats they are, joined together and seemingly growing out of the car. Trim inside is open-pore wood inlaid with aluminium and there’s plenty of white nappa leather. The button-back Chesterfield sofa-style upholstery has a neat twist: the buttons are tiny Mercedes three-pointed stars, each back-lit in blue. 

In fact, there’s quite a blue hue to everything inside, with both the 360-degree glass panel that encircles the cabin and the transparent centre tunnel glowing in the colour. Behind the glass panel are the dials – digital, but with real needles – and information screens, while the centre console provides a spooky visualisation of the electric energy flow.

Like the coupe, this concept is of course all-electric. This is subtly signalled by the Rose Gold finish – Mercedes’ hue of choice to signify its electric cars – in places like the trim on the centre-lock 24-inch wheels. Within each of those wheels is an electric motor fed by batteries under the car’s floor for a total, all-wheel drive power system of nearly 750bhp. 0-62mph? Under four seconds.

Perhaps more pertinent, as both Mercedes EQ electric cars and standalone Maybach models get closer to production, is the claim that the Vision Maybach 6 Cabriolet has a range of 200-300 miles, with a quick-charge function able to add 62 miles of range in just five minutes.

Enough to get you home if it rains then… even in Southern California.