Maybach Maybach Exelero

The Story

The Maybach Exelero is the most famous car Maybach ever built that you cannot buy. It began as a tyre advert: in 2005 the German tyre maker Fulda — part of Goodyear — commissioned Maybach to build a one-off coupe to showcase a new high-performance tyre, reviving a 1938 idea (Fulda had done exactly this once before, with a streamlined pre-war Maybach that vanished in the war). The shape came from a competition won by a 24-year-old Pforzheim design student, Fredrik Burchhardt; the car was hand-built in Turin by the coachbuilder Stola; and under its 5.9-litre twin-turbo V12 lay the bones of a Maybach 57. The result was a two-and-a-half-tonne, ~690 hp black missile that, on 1 May 2005, ex-DTM champion Klaus Ludwig drove around the Nardò ring at 351.45 km/h — 218 mph — on standard Fulda tyres.

Then the legend swallowed the facts. The Exelero became a hip-hop totem — it appears in Jay-Z’s 2006 ‘Lost One’ video (loaned, not owned, despite the persistent rumour) — and in 2011 rapper Birdman announced on Twitter that he’d bought it for $8 million. He hadn’t: the then-owner’s camp told the press ‘Birdman is yet to pay for the car,’ which ‘remains the property of’ its seller, and the deal was never completed. The documented chain runs Maybach → Fulda → a couple of private collectors → its current home in Germany’s Nationales Automuseum (The Loh Collection). Everything in between is tabloid.