Azernews.Az

By Bloomberg

Mercedes-Benz set the starting price of the Maybach Pullman S-Class at about 500,000 euros ($570,000) as the Daimler AG division prepares to present the three-row sedan at the Geneva auto show next month.

The 6.5-meter (21-foot) vehicle is Mercedes’s latest effort to win the world’s wealthiest car buyers. With a chauffeur at the wheel, four passengers will be able to sit opposite each other in two executive seats and two additional fold-out seats that face backward. Deliveries of the model, the second Mercedes to wear the Maybach badge after an S-Class with an extended wheelbase presented last year, will start in early 2016, the Stuttgart, Germany-based manufacturer said in a statement today.

“The new Mercedes-Maybach Pullman embodies the claim for highest exclusivity,” Ola Kaellenius, Mercedes’s head of sales, said in the statement.

Mercedes is reviving Maybach as a sub-brand to pull in ultra-rich customers as Daimler Chief Executive Officer Dieter Zetsche pushes to overtake BMW and Audi in luxury-car sales by 2020. With extras such as armor plating, the Pullman will cost about $1 million, making it the world’s most expensive sedan.

Kitted out with a 530-horsepower V12 engine, the car has about four inches more headroom than the standard S-Class. A partition window between the driver’s compartment and passengers can become opaque with the touch of a button, and a retractable 18.5-inch flat screen -- about twice the size of an iPad -- is also part of the standard equipment.

Surging demand for the S-Class helped Mercedes, the third biggest maker of luxury cars, sell a record number of vehicles last year. Its deliveries grew at a faster rate than at competitors BMW AG and Volkswagen AG’s Audi unit, helping Mercedes to close the gap.