Merc’s S-Class Pullman is 6.5m of excess

Not so confident in your parallel parking abilities? This may not be the car for you. This is the Mercedes-Maybach Pullman - the stretched, limo version of the new Maybach S-Class - and it is vast.

Six hundred and fifty centimetres of vast, to be exact, or just over a metre longer than that not-very-short Maybach S-Class. It also stands 10cm taller than the S-Class, and though Merc hasn't yet confirmed kerbweight, it's safe to say the Pullman should be heavy enough to disrupt local tides.

Need some sense of the likely buyers of the Pullman? Consider this line from its promotional bumf: "The prices for unarmoured models start at around half a million euros."

The vague mention of half a million euros - or around £370,000 at current exchange rates - is less noteworthy than the use of the word ‘unarmoured'. That Merc feels it necessary to specify that you could have your Pullman in non-bulletproof form rather suggests its potential market may be concerned with ballistics-absorbing capability.

Such buyers will doubtless be delighted by the Pullman's luxuriously appointed cabin, described - not without reason - as a ‘club lounge'. Merc suggests that the oligarch-dictator owner and his/her ‘VIP guest' should sit in the two forward-facing rear seats, while their business foes/henchmen should take the fold-down, rear-facing chairs.

There is, of course, a glass partition between rear cabin and the driver's area, which flips from transparent to opaque at the touch of a button to save Jeeves the embarrassment of witnessing you throttling a minion to death. In front of said partition is a 47cm monitor that raises and lowers electrically, while the S-Class's Burmester stero has been rendered yet more ear-shattering.

Potential Pullman purchasers are unlikely to be concerned by what, exactly, is under the bonnet of their new limo, but they'll doubtless be happy to know that the range-topping S600 version has enough power to outrun any minor militias, its 6.0-litre V12 churning out 530bhp and no fewer than 613 torques from 1900rpm.

Merc's history of the ‘Pullman' name - one originally applied to luxurious, open-plan railway carriages - stretches back to 1960. The most famous Mercedes Pullman celebrates its fiftieth birthday this year: the glorious, daft ‘Grosser' S600, as owned by our very own oligarch-dictator, Commander Clarkson...