WHAT do Elvis Presley, Pol Pot and the Pope have in common? The Mercedes-Benz Pullman.

For 52 years, this six-seat state limousine has been the go-to car for the 0.001 percent. This year, the armoured version celebrates half a century of protecting dictators who met a grisly end anyway: Hussein, Gaddafi, Ceausescu.

And now there’s a new one. This time badged the Mercedes-Maybach Pullman, it is the new patriarch of the S-Class family and the new ride of choice for despots everywhere.

“In the Gulf, around 70 percent of Pullman customers are royal,” explains Markus Rubenbauer (below), Mercedes’ head of Pullman and armoured cars.

The locals do little to disguise their confusion at finding a solid German engineer and an impoverished Irish journalist in the back seats, rather than the aquiline features of their hereditary Emir, Sheikh Mohammed. I motor the curtains closed to save disappointment.

Markus won’t say how many will be built each year, just that Mercedes “wants the cars in the hands of the right people”. I’m not sure that Robert Mugabe and Idi Amin constitute “the right people”. Mercedes only made 302 of the original 600 Pullman over 17 years. Still, demand for the new one is higher than expected.

Markus is predictably discreet about who the customers are, but confirms they include heads of state and that most put tyrannising aside for a moment to personally choose at least the colour and trim of their new official ride.

Protocol demands that heads of state enter the car first; the problem was that their interpreters then had to shuffle past them like middle-seat late-comers at the movies in order to get into the rear-facing seats. You cannot show your backside to a president or a king. A more fitting solution was required.

The answer is the new Pullman’s colossal rear door – 1.35 metres long, easily the biggest fitted to any ‘production’ car and almost long enough to take late diminutive Pullman fan and keen anti-imperialist Kim Jong-Il if you inserted him horizontally.

So you’ve overthrown the old guy, installed yourself as President for Life, pinned a row of medals to your chest and bought a Pullman. How’s the ownership experience?

That door is predictably heavy, but Mercedes’ research shows that in 90 percent of ‘door-opening events’, someone other than the rear-seat occupants will be doing the work. Should revolutionaries shoot your footman, a motor will do the job instead.

There are gadgets to preserve your privacy, such as the powered curtains on all windows, and the glass divider that slides up to shut out the driver and turns opaque at the touch of a button so he can’t see you weep at the futility of it all. You can still instruct him via the intercom; you know your car is large when it requires its own internal communications system.

Otherwise the cabin is remarkably sober and gadgets are limited. The main seats recline, of course, and have pop-out calf supports. There’s a fridge and beautifully engineered fold-out tables in the divider. There are small screens in the base of each rear-facing seat, visible when they’re folded up, and an 18.5-inch flat screen that motors up from the driver partition. The hallmark Maybach rear-cabin dials for speed, time and temperature are mounted in the roof, as are two of the 24 Burmester speakers. There are surprisingly few options. Markus says the Pullman has been kept deliberately simple to order because the customers are kind of busy.

You can also splash $38,000 on a panoramic sunroof, and around $750,000 on armouring. Needing armour is the sign that you’ve really made it; Hugh Hefner didn’t need to armour his, but you can bet Vladimir Putin does.

I didn’t drive the Pullman. It seemed about as relevant as President Obama flying Air Force One. I assume that the chauffeur gets the same tech-fest that marks all new S-Classes, but does Lord Grantham care if Mrs Patmore’s Aga has a temperature gauge?

Motoring journalists like to talk about the ‘distant thrum’ of a refined multi-cylinder engine, but in this case the 390kW twin-turbocharged 6.0-litre V12 really is a long way away. Pleasingly, it’s not Tesla-silent, but any vibration dissipates long before it reaches your royal backside.

But the Pullman’s greatest and defining feature is those rear-facing ‘interpreter’s’ seats. That’s how Mercedes describes them, but you can put anyone you like in there: your bodyguards, two of your concubines, your nuclear-code-carrier, your psychotic brother-in-law who you made chief of your Secret Police.

They’re a little firm. But their occupants would be wise not to complain.

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