History · 1909–today
Never the biggest. Always the grandest.
The father designed the first Mercedes. The son powered the Zeppelins. Together they created the one German name that has only ever meant excess — and it took a century and three lives to make it stick.
Echterdingen, 5 August 1908. Count Zeppelin's airship LZ 4 lies anchored in a field when a summer storm tears it loose and throws it into the trees. The hydrogen goes up in a pillar of fire. It should be the end of the airship dream — instead, donations flood in from all over Germany, and the Count rebuilds. This time he wants engines that do not fail. He knows exactly whom to ask: the Maybachs.
On 23 March 1909, Wilhelm Maybach — the most celebrated engine designer alive — founded Luftfahrzeug-Motorenbau GmbH with his son Karl as technical director, to build powerplants for Zeppelin's airships. Out of that company would come the grandest German cars of the prewar world, a decade-long duel with Rolls-Royce, and, eventually, the crown of the modern Mercedes range.
Chapter I · 1846–1907
The king of constructors.
Before Maybach was a brand, it was a man. Wilhelm Maybach spent three decades as Gottlieb Daimler's design genius, inventing along the way much of what made the automobile possible: the spray-nozzle carburetor, the honeycomb radiator, early four-cylinder car engines.
His masterpiece came in 1900–1901, when dealer Emil Jellinek commissioned a radical new racing car and named it after his daughter: the Mercedes 35 PS, widely regarded as the first modern automobile. The French press crowned Maybach the "king of constructors."
Yet the king had no kingdom. Sidelined by the board of Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft after Daimler's death, Wilhelm left the company in 1907, sixty-one years old and nowhere near finished.
He had one advantage: a brilliant son. Karl Maybach had grown up inside his father's workshops, engineer by blood and by training — and when the Zeppelin catastrophe at Echterdingen turned into a national rebuilding effort, father and son had both the reputation and the opportunity to start again, together.
Chapter II · 1909–1919
Engines for the sky.
The new company set up in Bissingen an der Enz, moving to Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance — Zeppelin's home ground — in 1912, when it took the name Maybach-Motorenbau. Karl ran the engineering, and his airship engines were built to a standard aviation had never seen: light, endlessly durable, serviceable in flight.
Airship engines made the Maybach name synonymous with reliability at altitude, and by the twenties Zeppelins flew exclusively on Maybach power. But the First World War ended with the Treaty of Versailles banning German aircraft-engine production — and a world-class engine works suddenly had nothing to put its engines in.
Chapter III · 1921–1941
The grandest Germans.
Karl's answer was to aim upward. After first selling car engines to the Dutch maker Spyker, Maybach presented its own automobile at the 1921 Berlin Motor Show: the W3, a 5.7-liter, 70-horsepower six, and the first German car with brakes on all four wheels. Maybach built the chassis and running gear; Germany's finest coachbuilders dressed each one to order.
In 1929 came the Type 12 — Germany's first series-production twelve-cylinder car — and from 1930 the legend itself: the Zeppelin, named for the airships that had paid for it all. The DS8 of 1931 carried an eight-liter V12 and, later, the extraordinary Variorex transmission with eight pre-selectable gears.
The Zeppelin weighed around three tonnes — enough that, under the law of the day, its owner technically needed a truck license to drive it. Most didn't drive; they were driven. Around 200 DS8s were built, each one among the most expensive and most powerful cars in the world.
In twenty years, Maybach built only about 1,800 automobiles — exclusivity as a business model, half a century early. The company's real volume was elsewhere: Karl's high-speed diesels for railcars, pursuing his ambition to retire the steam locomotive. In 1941 car production stopped for good; the war effort consumed the works, which built tank engines until Allied bombs found Friedrichshafen.
- DS8 displacement
- 8.0 ℓ
- Power
- 200 PS
- Forward gears
- 8
- Cars in 20 years
- ~1,800
Type 12 · Germany's first series-production twelve-cylinder car
12 cylinders
From the outside, only initiates could tell: a gilded wreath around the number twelve on the radiator mascot. Maybach never needed to shout.
The emblem
Double M.
Two interlocked Ms in an orb — originally for Maybach-Motorenbau, the engine works on Lake Constance. When the name returned in 2002, the same emblem was reread as Maybach Manufaktur. Same letters, same promise: built by hand, for very few.
Chapter IV · 1945–1997
The long sleep.
After the war there were no more Maybach automobiles — only engines. Karl Maybach kept designing them, including a 1,000-horsepower unit commissioned by the French government. In 1960, Daimler-Benz took over the Friedrichshafen works, reuniting the Maybach name with the company Wilhelm had helped create; the engine business became MTU Friedrichshafen, whose diesels still drive ships, trains and power plants today.
The cars slept for six decades. Then, at the 1997 Tokyo Motor Show, Mercedes-Benz rolled out a vast double-M concept sedan and asked the world a question it had been quietly researching for years: would anyone pay Rolls-Royce money for a German car?
Chapter V · 2002–2012
The magnificent failure.
The answer arrived in 2002: the Maybach 57 and 62, named for their lengths in decimeters, hand-finished at the Maybach Manufaktur in Sindelfingen. Twin-turbo V12s of 550 and later 612 PS, curtained rear compartments, reclining airline seats — nothing about the cars themselves was half-hearted.
The market never came. Against the theater of a Rolls-Royce Phantom, the Maybach read as an S-Class in a tailcoat, and the sales targets drifted out of reach year after year.
There were glorious footnotes — the one-off Exelero coupé, the open-rear 62 S Landaulet — but when production ended in 2012, just 3,321 cars had been built in a decade. Daimler retired the standalone brand.
The obituaries called it hubris. It was really a lesson in packaging: the name had power, but it needed the star beside it, not instead of it.
- Maybach 62 length
- 6.17 m
- V12, S models
- 612 PS
- Years on sale
- 10
- Total built
- 3,321
Chapter VI · 2014–today
The star and the double M.
In November 2014, Maybach returned the way it should have the first time: not against Mercedes but on top of it. The Mercedes-Maybach S-Class took the finest sedan in the world, stretched it, silenced it and trimmed it beyond anything the options list allowed — at a price that undercut a Phantom several times over.
This time the market answered immediately, above all in China, and the range grew: the S 600 Pullman, the 99-unit G 650 Landaulet, the GLS 600, the V12 S 680, the electric EQS SUV.
The sub-brand even allowed itself dreams again — the Vision Mercedes-Maybach 6, a six-meter electric coupé with more than a little Zeppelin in its proportions.
A century after Wilhelm and Karl built engines for airships, the double M sits where they always intended it: on the radiator of the grandest car Mercedes knows how to make.
One name, six eras.
From airship engines over Lake Constance to the crown of the Mercedes range.
1909
For the Count
Wilhelm and Karl Maybach found an engine company to power Count Zeppelin's airships.
1921
The W3
Versailles bans aircraft engines, so Maybach builds a car — the first German one with four-wheel brakes.
1931
Zeppelin DS8
An eight-liter V12 flagship so heavy its owners legally needed a truck license.
1960
Into Daimler
Daimler-Benz takes over the engine works; as MTU Friedrichshafen it powers ships and trains to this day.
2002
The revival
The Maybach 57 and 62 relaunch the name against Rolls-Royce. A decade later, 3,321 cars built.
2014
Mercedes-Maybach
Reborn as the top of the Mercedes range — and this time, the double M works.
Epilogue
The name that would not die.
Most automotive names die once. Maybach survived the end of the airships, the end of its own cars in 1941, and the very public failure of its 2002 resurrection — and returned each time, because the thing it stood for never lost value: engineering without a budget line for compromise.
Wilhelm Maybach designed the first Mercedes; today his name marks the last word in them. Few careers in this industry have ever closed so perfect a circle.