First Drive: Mercedes-Maybach S 680

I grew up driving Sunset Boulevard to school daily. I know its every turn, when and how to feather the throttle. It's possible to never touch the brake if the green light gods give you no reason to. When I was tossed the keys and slid into the new Mercedes-Maybach S 680, rather than drive the hills or Angeles Crest, PCH, which still shows the aftermath of the Palisades Fire more than a year and a half after it raged, or the stitched-together pieces of freeway that every local car journalist knows really only open up in the wee hours of the morning, I chose the street with a movie named after it.

In March 2026 Mercedes-Benz launched a global campaign with 20th Century Studios called "The Art of Arrival," built around the new S-Class as the vehicle that carries Runway editor-in-chief Miranda Priestly, played again by Meryl Streep, in The Devil Wears Prada 2. That placement fell twenty years after the Mercedes-Benz that carried the same character in the original film. Mercedes-Benz's campaign page describes a power that "doesn't need to announce itself loudly" but is "felt in the details."

Those details include rose gold worked into the twin-star headlamps, a Mercedes-Benz star at the center of each silver-finish forged wheel, mounted on a ball bearing so that it stays upright whatever the wheel is doing, and V12 badges on the front fenders that Mercedes will remove only if you also lose the model badge on the trunk.

The Mercedes-Maybach S 680 may be built for boulevards, but it can certainly handle curves. At 215.9 inches long and weighing 5,280 pounds, like any Maybach it's known for its backseat elegance, though not necessarily defined by it. Though it has a multi-stage fine dust filter under the Energizing Air Control package, and active ambient lighting running 199 LEDs across 64 colors, two of them reserved for Maybach and named Rose Gold and Amethyst Glow, this sunny summer day called for windows down, all 31 speakers and 1,690 watts of the Burmester 4D system up.

Wind in the hair and Dolby Atmos engaged, everything fell away. The finest driving moments are the ones where that happens: traffic, the car itself, whatever you carried in with you, until the only thing left is the road. It's a rare pleasure, and one the S 680 granted me. The hand-built 6.0-liter twin-turbo V12 responded immediately, as engines of that size do. There were some gentle purrs and some louder hums, but those too slipped by in the breeze.

From Beverly Hills to the Pacific Ocean is a 20-minute drive (there are still some places in LA that take 20 minutes) through the flats of Beverly Hills, past the former Playboy Mansion and Will Rogers State Historic Park. 

The 664 lb-ft arrives at 2,000 rpm and holds to 4,500; the effect of that much torque delivered that early is that the car never appears to be working, with acceleration arriving as a change of scenery rather than an event. Braking behaves the same way, slowing the car gradually enough that a full glass of champagne would survive it. Mercedes has anticipated that moment with a refrigerated compartment behind the rear armrest and two cupholders in the rear console shaped to cradle the optional silver-plated Robbe & Berking flutes.

The S-Class palette runs past 150 exterior paints and more than 400 interior colors, one of the two new exterior finishes carrying a glass-flake clearcoat. MANUFAKTUR Made to Measure goes further still, opening hundreds of historic Mercedes-Benz and Maybach paint colors along with a library of leathers and stitching shades. The studio where that happens opened in Beverly Hills this summer.

"We don't have taste police," Mathias Geisen, who joined the company's global board of management in February 2025 and looks after sales and customer experience, told Crown & Caliber. "Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder," he added.

The new grille is 20 percent larger and lit around its edge. The Maybach name glows inside it, new to this model. Pay for the option and the star on the hood lights up. Open a door and a projector in the sill writes the name onto the asphalt beside you. Four illuminated announcements, then, before anyone has stepped out of the car.

Mercedes has said emissions rules take the V12 out of a long list of markets, Germany among them, which means it no longer sells its twelve-cylinder flagship in the country that builds it. The engine continues here, and in markets including China, South Korea and the Middle East. Twelve-cylinder luxury cars were scarce a few years ago and are scarcer now, which leaves the S 680 unusual next to its own siblings and in company mostly with Rolls-Royce.

The S 680 starts at $247,450 before destination and reaches U.S. dealerships this summer. It is a hand-built engine that fewer and fewer markets will let through, in a car that doesn’t really hurry. On the right stretch of Sunset, with the windows down, I never touched the brake.