Auto industry | Mercedes taps rugged luxury trend with world’s priciest SUV

Mercedes-Benz is tapping into the popularity of ultra-luxurious all-terrain vehicles, with a new Maybach SUV that can ferry passengers over desert dunes with an open top and thermal cupholders.

The Mercedes-Maybach G-Class 650, shown at the Geneva auto show, will be the world’s most expensive sport utility vehicle with a price of about USD500,000. It’s Daimler AG’s latest extension of the top-of-the-line Maybach marque that it resurrected amid surging demand for higher-end models. Limited to a run of 99, the SUV will have a V12 engine and a landaulet style, with a front row that’s covered and a retractable fabric roof in the back.

“This car meets the highest demands for luxury and yet still has all the elements that make the G-Class a real off-roader,” said Gunner Guethenke, who heads Mercedes’s SUV business. Customers who buy the marque’s G-Class – the segment is named for Gelaendewagen, the German term for all-terrain vehicles – are looking for something “unique,” he said.

Under pressure to foot the soaring bill of developing electric cars, autonomous-driving features and ride- sharing platforms, Daimler is more aggressively targeting ultra-wealthy customers with high-margin models on the one hand, while also adding more affordable cars that sell in large volumes. That strategy helped Mercedes unseat rival BMW AG as the world’s best-selling luxury marque last year and allowed Daimler to boost its research and development budget by almost a quarter.

After struggling for years to sustain a niche for Maybach, Mercedes revived the 1930’s-era sub-brand in 2014 and has since expanded it with more opulent and spacious adaptations of popular models, such as convertible and three-row stretch limousine versions of the Mercedes S-Class sedan.

The Maybach G650, which will test customers’ appetite for a full-production SUV from that marque, will have an electric – and dimmable – glass partition to separate passengers from the driver, retractable footrests and folding tables stashed in the middle console. To master truly rugged terrains, the vehicle is positioned almost half a meter (1.6 feet) above the ground. It’ll be available for sale after September. Bloomberg