Luxury liner; Maybach 62 spares no extravagance in Wall Street debut.(Mercedes-Benz markets new car)(Brief Article)

It's real. We've seen it move under its own power, caressed its soft Nappa leather with our fingertips, explored its massaging, ventilated rear bucket seats that recline like first-class airliner easy chairs. The Maybach 62 made its world premiere in New York City on July 2, and promptly began redefining the expression, ``over the top.''

Since first displaying a Maybach behind heavily tinted glass at the Geneva show (AW, March 18), parent company Mercedes-Benz has been coyly stripping away the shield, announcing names that follow yachting practice in designating the vehicle's length (57 and 62, for 5.7 meters and 6.2 meters), even flashing a photo here and there.

Finally, a car was driven into a hall at 55 Wall Street to meet the press. The intent was surely to impress Wall Street but the presentation was more Broadway. The car had been assembled at the new Maybach Manufaktur plant in Sindelfingen, Germany, trucked to Southampton, England, slipped into a big glass box and loaded onto the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth 2. After five days riding on the sun deck high behind the Cunard liner's tall red funnel, the Maybach was plucked from its perch by a giant helicopter and settled, gently, onto a pier. Then the long, dark blue sedan was driven to Wall Street behind a police escort.

Big-budget publicity stunts aside, what had we flown to New York to see? The longer of the two models of Maybach (the Maybach 57 will follow at this fall's Paris show), a name from the 1920s and 1930s that Mercedes-Benz has revived in a bid to compete head-to-head with BMW-owned Rolls-Royce and Volkswagen-owned Bentley (and, perhaps Bugatti) in the elite $300,000-plus segment.

This top 1 percent of the market continues to grow, despite dismal news emerging from the buildings just down the street from the press conference, said Jurgen Hubbert, board member in charge of Mercedes-Benz passenger cars (which includes both Maybach and Smart-go figure). There will be market enough, he asserted, for 1000 built-to-order Maybachs each year, 400 for North America.

If Wall Street was impressed, it didn't show it right away: DCX stock values slid a couple of points the day the Maybach performed its flashy disembarkation, in a week in which automakers announced new 0 percent financing programs and modest prospects for profit.

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