Originally Posted by Merc1

I think it all boils down to a combination of what we've all said here. Design and lack of name recognition. I never knew what a "Maybach" was either until it came out and I read up on it. The design wasn't impressive enough to overcome such a lack luster design to begin with. If it had been something stunning and off the charts designwise it would have been able to overcome the name recognition thing, but the next thing would be whether or not Rolls/Bentley customers would be impressed. It is easy to impress people that can't afford the car. When I go to Detroit or Chicago's auto shows, people ooh and aww all day long, but not a single one of them (including me) can even think about a 300K car! So are ooohs and ahhs don't mean squat..lol! It is the very rich and they're so "branded" to the point where a new brand would have to offer a stunning design both inside and out to overcome this. Look at how long Lexus took to become something in the U.S. and they still aren't anything in Europe or Japan despite them making some very, very good cars. Mercedes could have avoided all of this by calling it is Mercedes like they originally planned.

I think we're pretty much all in agreement overall, but differ on some of the smaller details. I mean they flew the car into downtown Manhattan via helicopter so they weren't quiet about the Maybach's introduction.

M