MERCEDES-MAYBACH BUILDS ONLY 50 OF ITS V12 EDITION

Mercedes-Maybach is still only building fifty of them.

The brand's official account spent the summer showing off one of the fifty Mercedes-Maybach V12 Edition sedans on a road trip through some of Europe's most scenic routes, the kind of scenery the ultra-limited car was built to be driven through rather than parked in a garage. It is based on the Mercedes-Maybach S 680, but nothing else about it is standard.

Under the hood is a handcrafted 6.0-liter twin-turbocharged V12 making 612 horsepower and 900 Newton-meters of torque, enough to push the four-door sedan to 62 mph in 4.5 seconds. That engine is the entire point of the car. Mercedes-Maybach built the V12 Edition to mark a century of putting twelve-cylinder engines in its most exclusive sedans, a lineage that traces back to the Maybach Zeppelin of the 1930s, one of the first production cars to carry a V12 at all. The brand has said the V12 will keep showing up in Maybach flagships into the 2030s, even as the rest of the lineup shifts toward hybrids and electrification.

Every one of the fifty examples goes through the Mercedes-Benz MANUFAKTUR program, the in-house division that handles the brand's most bespoke commissions, the same shop responsible for the Mercedes-Maybach SL 680 Manufaktur Classic Green built earlier this year. The V12 Edition wears a three-tone exterior finish, olive metallic on top, obsidian black metallic below, with a silver metallic pinstripe splitting the two. The wheels match the olive tone, and the badging carries 24-karat gold accents.

Inside, the car is trimmed in saddle brown Nappa leather with burr walnut wood running across the dash and door panels, the same steering wheel material extended onto a diamond-quilted roof liner. A "1 of 50" badge sits in the center console next to a gold-finished V12 Edition emblem. Mercedes-Maybach even had Robbe & Berking make silver-plated champagne flutes to go with the car, packaged alongside a saddle-brown trunk mat and a bespoke key presentation box. It is the same level of customization that let LeBron James build a bespoke Maybach S 680 in Light Ivory through the same program, just applied here to a fixed, numbered run instead of a one-off.

The V12 Edition was first shown to VIP clients and press at Fort Michelangelo in Civitavecchia, Italy, before deliveries began in select markets in the fall. With only fifty cars split across the world, most owners are unlikely to ever park two of them in the same lot, let alone see one drive by on the street.