Quote:
Originally Posted by t walgamuth
The biggest reason for failure surely is the economy.
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News and sales figures from the competition says otherwise which is a reason I brought this poll up.
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Personally I feel that Maybachs failure was a collection of many smaller mistakes made on the part of Daimler. Here are my picks for the 3 biggest failures-
The first mistake was the obvious lack of brand recognition. Ten years after it's failure most people still have no idea what you're talking about when you use the name Maybach but most will at least have heard about Rolls Royce. Solutions to this problem would have been tricky but perhaps it would have been better if Mercedes came up with an entirely new name for the brand as opposed to resurrecting a little known one from the 30s. I don't think that branding it as a Mercedes would have worked well.
The second mistake was that while the back seats were fantastic and unique, the cockpit and most of the controls were far too similar to the S-Class which made the entire car much less distinct. Simply using more uniquely designed switches and making some styling/layout changes to the cockpit would probably have made a difference
The third mistake was probably the biggest of all actually; Model line up. The flagship 62 was really meant to be chauffeur driven but it was given far too much emphasis over the 57. The problem with the 57 then became the fact that it wasn't much of a drivers car either due to it's similarities to the S-Class (See mistake #2) Maybach tried to rectify this with the "S" models which had more grunt but again, they were still too much of chauffeurs cars to be driven by most owners. It didn't help that they were more expensive which brings us to the Zeppelin models. The cars were basically the same but with some different touches to the interior upholstery. That would have been fine if the brand was selling well but the Maybach already had a top notch interior which really didn't need to be played around with. So what you ended up with was a more expensive version of a car that was already hard enough to sell. Finally there was the most expensive model of all, the Landaulet. My personal favorite but at over $1,000,000 a copy it certainly wasn't going to save the brand.
So what happened with the model line-up? It got more expensive and even more exclusive when what Maybach really needed was a cheaper model that could open up the brand to a wider market. This is where Mercedes really went wrong. A Maybach coupe priced between $200,000-300,000 could have made a huge difference. The example of course was the futuristic Exelero concept which people tried to buy but which was never made. Would it have really been so hard to make a cheaper toned down version of the Exelero to sell in that price range?