Does the Mercedes-Maybach SL 680 Monogram Series epitomise Pebble Beach culture?

Mercedes has a sizeable stake in the annual Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, the prestige event of Monterey Car Week. Not only does the German brand host a vast pavilion, the Star Lounge, on the site, but the company also takes over one of the grandest rooms in the Pebble Beach Golf Club to serve as its hospitality lounge throughout the weekend. And to cap it off, it flies in some of the most impressive cars from its extensive collection of classics, to drive and exhibit.

As a guest of Mercedes’ Maybach brand, we got to experience this largesse at first hand. Not only did the company unveil a new model, the Mercedes-Maybach SL 680 Monogram Series, it also laid on a fleet of other Maybachs with which to experience one of the world’s greatest roads, the coastal Highway One, and offered up driving experiences in a pair of iconic vintage cars.

Many of the world’s greatest car collections are kept in the US, and many of those live on the West Coast, so Pebble Beach functions as both a crucial social event, a high-profile salesroom for some important auction houses, and a place for manufacturers and collectors alike to establish bragging rights over who owns the best kept and best presented historic automobile. Each year sees a cavalcade of unique machinery, from one-off concept cars to vintage racing machines from every era, and the occasional show-stopper in the form of a reclusive or rediscovered icon making its reappearance on this most glamourous of world stages.

On top of all this, Monterey Car Week is increasingly a place for launches and events, as the mainstream luxury manufacturers and the growing coterie of specialist coachbuilders flock to Northern California to pitch new product to the people most likely to buy it. As well as Mercedes, there was also a sizeable presence from JLR, Rolls-Royce, Cadillac, Maserati, Bugatti, Rivian, Rimac, Lamborghini, and more. All of whom had new things to say and judged that the moneyed atmosphere, amenable climate and rarefied company to be the very best place to present it.

Away from the ticketed events, most of which take place at the exclusive Pebble Beach Golf Course, the narrow tourist-infested streets of Carmel and Monterey echo with the sound of revving engines and crackling exhausts as every supercar, classic and hotrod owner within several hundred miles descends on the coast to show off their wheels. Parking lots are stacked with low-slung rows of polychromatic be-winged ego fluffers. There’s a class element to all this, of course, for Pebble and Quail are exclusive and aloof, expensive to access and with a demographic that skews unashamedly and almost exclusively white. With a few notable exceptions, it's also very, very male.

Much of the on-street action is provided by those who live a world away from the meticulously manicured lawns of Pebble. It’s a distinctly town versus gown situation, with beautifully kept examples of working-class car culture, from low-riders to bikers, extreme hotrods, highly tuned Japanese sports cars and the occasional Cybertruck, providing a counterpoint to the polished precision, timeworn patina and storied histories of Pebble’s old-money exclusivity. Much was made of the fact that Honda's HP-X concept was the Japanese brand's debut appearance on the hallowed Concours greens.

Mercedes was able to march straight into this class-war minefield with nary a thought. That’s because, with well over a century of history and a broad sweep of products that takes in every conceivable demographic and desire, the company can be all things to all people.

There’s the racing pedigree, ably demonstrated by the 1924 Mercedes two-litre Targa Florio race car, making its debut following a complete restoration by Mercedes-Benz Classic. There’s also the stunning C111-II experimental vehicle on hand, a 1970 supercar fitted with a four-rotor Wankel engine.

SL 680 Monogram Series and more from Maybach at Pebble Beach

But we’re here for Maybach, represented not just by the SL 680 – the sub-brand’s first dedicated sports car – but also by the mighty 1932 Maybach Zeppelin DS 8, a titanic Teutonic conveyance that dates from a troublesome era, to put it mildly. Still, nothing could detract from Mercedes-Benz Classic’s meticulous mechanical and physical restoration, the kind of attention to detail that the company is putting into the contemporary Maybach line of enhanced Mercedes passenger cars.

The new SL 680 joins a line up that includes the Mercedes-Maybach GLS, the Mercedes-Maybach S-Class, and the first all-electric Maybach, the Mercedes‑Maybach EQS SUV. We sampled all these cars over the course of our stay in Monterey, either behind the wheel or ensconced within the cocoon-like passenger compartment. They certainly rival their peers for quality and refinement, and there’s a stealthy quality in the way the high-luxury Maybach ethos can be subsumed within a more familiar Mercedes silhouette.

However, Maybach also has a more outrageous conceptual side that hasn’t yet impacted on its production cars. At the 2016 Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, the company revealed the 5.7m long Vision Mercedes-Maybach 6, returning the following year with the dramatic droptop Vision Mercedes Maybach 6 Cabriolet. In our opinion, it’s cars like this, along with even more dramatic Project Maybach, a collaboration with the late Virgil Abloh, that attain and exceed the ethos of the brand.

The latter spawned the Maybach by Virgil Abloh, a limited-edition version of the Mercedes-Maybach S-Class. The SL 680 shares a similar ethos, taking a Mercedes ‘base’ model and upgrading every element of it far above what would otherwise be possible. In this case, the headline changes are relatively superficial, chief amongst them the deletion of the (already vestigial) rear seats in favour of a lavishly trimmed white Nappa leather cabin for two, with a surfeit of ‘M’ monograph branding applied, most noticeably to the bonnet. Here is a classic example of the great Venn diagram of craftsmanship, design, wealth and taste at work; where would you place this expertly and carefully monogrammed bonnet within it?

The SL 680 also gets a tweaked 4.0-litre biturbo V8 offering 585hp, smoothly delivered through a 9-speed automatic transmission. Variable all-wheel drive helps traction and dynamic performance. The exhaust note is toned down from its shoutier Mercedes-AMG sibling, but even though the SL 680 is pitched at Monegasque boulevards and the broad highways of the Middle East and not the race track, it’s still a very credible performer. The car's presence is bolstered by big multi-spoke wheels, although it doesn’t quite have the scale and impact of a Maybach SUV or limousine.

The SL 680’s reveal party (but not these desert-retreat press pics) took place on a long LED-screen catwalk set up in the garden of a modernist village on the slopes above Pebble Beach. Designed by San Francisco architect Jim Jennings for a couple of noted contemporary collectors, the 6,700 sq ft house is a symphony of sharp edges in aluminium, stone and glass, albeit rather a sterile exercise. It’s a very different proposition from some of the more vernacular compositions that flank it, even if they’re no less ostentatious in scale and accommodation.

Was it a good fit for Maybach, a company that seems to foreground a very conservative classicism? Sitting in the house’s upstairs sitting, Michael Schiebe, chairman of the board of management of Mercedes, stressed that ‘we’re not just putting a name on a Mercedes. [A Maybach] requires more craftsmanship and technology… customers want a car that’s a statement. It has to differentiate.’ Asked whether there’s a conflict between Maybach’s own highly bespoke editions, like the Monogram Series (and the Virgil Abloh S-Class), and customers’ desire for their own individual specifications, Daniel Lescow, head of Mercedes-Maybach, explained that ‘a lot of customers trust the curated options we offer to them’. ‘We have cooked the perfect dish,’ Schiebe adds.

As the first open two-seater Maybach in the modern era, the Mercedes-Maybach SL680 Monogram Series doesn’t share much design DNA with the mighty Zeppelin parked out front at the villa. Yet there’s a shared ethos of wealth and status, one that a casual observer might struggle to understand.

Pebble Beach sees America tipped on edge so that the finest and wealthiest aspects of its elaborate car culture roll west for the weekend. From the ritual ‘Dawn Patrol’ experience of watching the various concours classes driving themselves onto the Pacific-front greens of the Pebble Beach Golf Club on the Sunday morning, to the glamorous branded villas and pavilions, it’s a place where money meets, old and new.

Everyone's an expert at Pebble, ready with a little bit of trivia to hand or a personal connection or name drop they can trot out to impress or ingratiate. As a result, it's a mansplainer’s paradise, and men exchange muttered half-remembered stats and facts and model names to each other and anyone within earshot. Drones buzz overhead as snippets of outlandish conversational oneupmanship drift past. 'I have a lot of friends who are precision stunt drivers.’ 'Have you driven the new Corvette. It's over a 1,000 horsepower without turbochargers... such amazing value compared to a Ferrari.’

The traditionalists have their rituals and uniform, with picnic blankets spread out at 5.30am, a sea of Panama hats and 'dawn patrol' caps, doled out for free by golf course lackies who are instantly swarmed when they start handing them out. Here you’ll find the upper echelons of America's incredibly skewed social strata, showing cars that are family heirlooms, passed down through generations. Yet there are also cars that are precious investments, cars that form a priceless part of a company's heritage and identity, one-offs, both famed and infamous, and lost icons rediscovered.

Among the grand old American families, you’ll find car bros, classic car bros, tech bros and finance bros, alongside Hollywood A-listers, influencers, investors and collectors, and the lucky scrum of media in possession of the correct set of wristbands. Perhaps this is where new money comes to be converted into old, filtered through the 140-year-old cult of the automobile, shoring up the gates and walls of the establishment in the process. In order for the SL 680 to grace the lawns of Pebble 2124, the established order will inevitably have to change.

Mercedes-Maybach SL 680 Monogram Series, available from spring 2025, Mercedes-Benz.com

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