Ranked: the longest cars made by every major car-maker

And in this case people are absolutely right. But it’s also true that some manufacturers produced absolute behemoths many decades ago, and have not let rip to quite that extent since.

To illustrate both sides of this, we’re focussing on length, and presenting the longest models produced by 50 brands in increasing order of size. Obviously we need some rules here, so we’re considering any production vehicle which could be bought for non-commercial use by a member of the public, and setting a lower limit of 4900mm.

In 2004, just over a decade before its demise, Saab produced its first SUV, based on the same platform as several vehicles marketed by GM’s North American brands.

At 4907mm, the 9-7X would prove to be the longest vehicle in Saab’s history, though it was run close by the slightly later 9-5 Estate, which measured 4841mm.

As a manufacturer of high-performance sporting cars, Ferrari has generally developed cars which are shorter than the 4.9-metre minimum length we’re using here. But there are occasional exceptions, such as the front-engined 612 Scaglietti and its successor, the FF.

Both of these broke through our threshold by less than half an inch. The GTC4Lusso, which replaced the FF, exceeded it by a greater margin with a length of 4922mm.

The most startling thing about the Gemera is its camless 2.0-litre three-cylinder engine, which is part of a hybrid powertrain producing around 1700bhp.

Less dramatically, it is also the Swedish supercar manufacturer’s first four-seat car, and inevitably also its longest model. It comes close to breaching the five-metre barrier, measuring 4975mm.

The second-generation Country Tourer was a derivative of the contemporary Sports Tourer, which is what Vauxhall called the estate version of the Insignia hatchback.

The bodyshells of the two cars were identical, but while the Sports Tourer measured 4908mm, the Country Tourer – which was intended for moderate off-road use and had front and rear skid plates – was slightly longer at 5004mm.

The DS saloon was only slightly less than five metres long, which would mean that it qualified for this list but for one thing: Citroen also produced an estate version.

Quirky, innovative and famed for its ability to soak up bumps without upsetting its occupants – and getting it a role as camera car covering the Grand National for many years - the estate (known in some markets as the Break or Safari) was 5026mm from bumper to bumper, surpassing all Citroens before or since.

Honda’s luxury division has produced relatively few models since its introduction in 1986. Of these, the longest for some time was the now discontinued RLX luxury saloon, which measured 5032mm.

That record has recently been broken by the MDX. In its new fourth-generation form, this three-row SUV requires 5039mm of measuring tape to be fully appreciated.

There will be fewer SUVs on this list than you might expect, because while they often have a large volume this tends to be more to do with width and height than length.

That said, Aston Martin’s first vehicle of this type, the DBX, is indeed its longest-ever car. Coincidentally, it exactly matches the Acura MDX at 5039mm.

Wealthy Chinese customers are so enthusiastic about very large saloons that several manufacturers find it worthwhile to develop historically long cars to satisfy that market alone.

The first of these on our list is the Excellence, a stretched version of the current S90. At 5083mm, its front and rear extremities are further apart than those of the current XC90 SUV – 4950mm – and even the famously lengthy 5020mm 960 Executive of the 1990s, which later became known as the S90 Royal.

The 4790mm LM002 SUV was Lamborghini’s longest production vehicle for many years before the Aventador-based Centenario supercar took its crown in 2016 with a new record of 4924mm.

Very soon afterwards, though, the Centenario dropped to second place. Lamborghini had returned (very successfully) to the SUV market with the Urus, which broke the five-metre barrier at 5112mm.

McLaren says that the Speedtail is its most aerodynamically efficient road-going model to date, as well as being the fastest. This is largely because of its long, tapering rear end, which is designed to cause as little disturbance as possible to the air behind the car, and therefore reduce drag.

The tail is part of the reason why this McLaren is also longer than any other, at 5137mm.

The current Carnival is the fourth in a series of MPVs which used to be known as Sedona in some markets.

At 5156mm, it’s longer than all its predecessors, and indeed than any other production Kia, including the hefty but very successful Telluride SUV.

The De Ville was arguably the most extravagant of the cars put into long-term production by UK company Panther Westwinds. The Jaguar-powered roadster was launched in 1974, but was made to look as if it was designed nearly half a century earlier, somewhat resembling the mighty Bugatti Royale.

As we’ll see, it was shorter than the Royale, but that didn’t stop it being Panther’s longest model. It was probably 5182mm long, though some sources – perhaps rounding up the metric figure – claim 5190mm.

When the Cayenne SUV was launched 20 years ago, some enthusiasts complained that Porsche was betraying its sports car heritage by moving into this sector of the market. The Cayenne is still around, and still takes up a lot of space, but it’s not the longest Porsche by any means. The Taycan Cross Turismo, for example, is more than an inch longer.

Neither of those models exceeds five metres, though. The standard Panamera does, and the long-wheelbase Executive version is longer still. At 5199mm, it’s the longest production Porsche there has ever been.

The original LS was the first car produced by Toyota’s luxury division. At its introduction it was already a notably long car, and in its current form it’s longer still at 5235mm.

Toyota builds other vehicles which are even longer than that, but the LS holds the record for the Lexus brand.

Of all Range Rovers (and indeed Land Rovers in general), the model on sale today is the longest there has ever been.

It’s offered in short- and long-wheelbase forms. The latter measures 5252mm, which makes it one of the lengthiest SUVs in history.

A good way to produce a very large MPV is to convert an equally large van. That’s what Hyundai did with the Starex, known in the UK as the i800. At over five metres, it was Hyundai’s longest vehicle to date.

The Starex has since been replaced by the Staria, which is longer still. It’s even marginally longer than the long-wheelbase Range Rover at 5253mm.

Jaguar built XJs for over half a century, from 1968 to 2019. Already large from day one, it inevitably grew larger over the years – by the end of production, the long-wheelbase version had increased in length to 5255mm.

For the avoidance of doubt, other figures have also been quoted, but these are the ones published by Jaguar itself.

Exotic as it may sound to people who don’t speak the language, quattroporte is simply the Italian word for ‘four doors’. Since Maserati usually builds cars with only two, it’s inevitable that the Quattroporte is in the running to be its longest model.

Sure enough, the current version is 5262mm from stem to stern. The Levante SUV, which also has four passenger doors, is bulkier overall, but shorter than the Quattroporte at 5003mm.

The Fiat situation is complicated. The Cross version of the Fullback pickup - a slightly altered Mitsubishi L200 - is often quoted as being 5305mm long, which puts it very slightly ahead of the 5300mm 2800 limousine produced for a few years around 1940.

The snag is that, when asked about this, Fiat told us the Fullback Cross actually measured 5300mm, which could easily be used to describe both vehicles. We’ll have to call this a draw, while suspecting that the Fullback Cross really is the longest Fiat, if only by a tiny margin.

Pickup trucks make up a very small part of Honda’s history, but since the early years of the 21st century the company has designed, built and sold two generations of the Ridgeline in North America.

As is usually the way of things, the second is larger than the first. Its 5339mm length is modest for a pickup available in its region, but unprecedented for a Honda.

Formerly known as the QX56, the QX80 SUV is based on a body-on-frame platform shared with the Nissan Titan pickup, which you’ll be reading about again shortly.

Full-size pickups are generally larger than SUVs, but Infiniti doesn’t sell any of those. Therefore, while the Titan is larger, the QX80 is the longest Infiniti to date, exactly matching the Honda Ridgeline at 5339mm.

The identity of the longest-ever Peugeot may come as a surprise to most Autocar readers. It’s the Landtrek, a pickup sold only in southern Africa and Latin America and based on the Chinese Kaicene F70, which was developed jointly by Peugeot and Changan Automobile.

The Landtrek is available with Single Cab and Double Cab body styles. The Double Cab is the longer of the two, at 5390mm.

The current 7 Series measures 5391mm (212.4in), which makes it comfortably the longest production car ever to wear a BMW badge.

BMW owns Rolls-Royce, which can supply discerning customers with an even longer model, but we’ll come to that one later.

The Taraf was the most recent model in the sporadic series of cars given Lagonda branding by Aston Martin. Built only in 2015 and 2016, it was marginally longer than today’s BMW 7 Series at 5396mm.

The Taraf was startlingly priced at $1 million in the US and £685,000 in the UK. As we said at the time, “For the same money you could buy both a Rolls-Royce Phantom and a Bentley Mulsanne plus a fully loaded Range Rover SV Autobiography on the side.”

The largest Renault-badged vehicle ever sold is the Alaskan pickup, whose length amounted to 5399mm.

In yet another case of one manufacturer selling a truck largely developed by another, the Alaskan was at heart a Nissan Navara. If you find this unsatisfactory, you might be heartened by the fact that the all-Renault 40 CV luxury car of 1911-1928 ran the Alaskan pretty close at 5340mm.

No Opel was grander than the 24/110, commonly known as the Regent. It was launched in 1928 and discontinued only a year later, at about the time Opel was taken over by General Motors.

From one end to the other, it measured 5400mm, a length Opel never approached again. The Regent name was used again in the 1930s for a version of a much smaller car which could not possibly be confused with the 24/110.

Most people in the market for a long Audi would presumably be satisfied with the regular A8, which comes in at 5190mm. If that seems a bit cramped, you could always go for the long-wheelbase, 5320mm A8L.

Still not satisfied? Tough luck, unless you happen to live in China, where you will have access to the even more enormous A8L Horch, which is named after company founder August Horch (1868-1951) and measures a phenomenal 5450mm, exceeding all previous Audis.

The third-generation BT-50 pickup is essentially an Isuzu D-Max with Mazda styling. Its standard length is 5280mm, but there are variations in some markets.

At the extreme, the Thunder, which sits at the top of the range in Australia, is fitted with several body additions including a substantial bull bar, making this particular BT-50 5470mm long.

The longest of the ‘traditional’ Hummers was the H1, the civilian version of the Humvee. General Motors discontinued Hummer in 2010, but has since reintroduced it as a sub-brand of GMC, producing only electric vehicles.

The first of these is the EV Pickup. It’s easily the longest production Hummer yet, at 5507mm, not including the spare wheel bolted to its hindquarters. The forthcoming EV SUV, though mechanically similar, will be shorter.

The Raider was a short-lived pickup built and sold in North America from 2005 to 2009. The brevity of its production run was due to poor sales, so this is by no means the most distinguished Mitsubishi ever built.

It is, however, the longest. Its dimensions seem to have varied slightly over time, but according to a Mitsubishi document published in 2007 it was 5585mm long in that year.

Chrysler built New Yorkers from the 1940s until nearly the end of the 20th century. All of them were large, but those available in the 1974 to 1978 model years were the longest of all at 5717mm.

The 1973 Imperial was longer still at 5977mm, and was in turn dwarfed by several limousines. However, although these vehicles were built by Chrysler (usually, in the case of the limos, in partnership with coachbuilders such as Ghia), they were never marketed under the parent company’s name.

Towards the end of the era when enormous passengers cars were still considered acceptable in North America, Plymouth’s largest model was the Gran Fury.

The first generation lasted from 1975 to 1977, and the longest version of that or any other period was the Wagon. Other US manufacturers were building even larger cars at the time, but the Wagon was still formidably long at 5751mm.

Outside North America, the longest Jeep might be expected to be the 5204mm long-wheelbase Grand Cherokee L, but this is a positive shorty compared with another model familiar to customers in its own region.

As previously noted, SUVs are not always particularly long despite their overall bulk, but the Grand Wagoneer L is an exception. End-to-end, it measures no less than 5758mm.

No, the longest Bentley isn’t the Bentayga SUV. Sure, the Bentayga takes up a lot of space, but it’s around half a metre, or just under two feet, shorter than the 5825mm Extended Wheelbase version of the discontinued Mulsanne.

The Mulsanne Grand Limousine was a metre longer even that that, but it was only ever built to special order. By our definition, it wasn’t therefore a production vehicle, so it doesn’t count.

In the second half of the 20th century, Dodge produced Monacos of many kinds. The one we’re interested in here is the mid-1970s Royal Monaco Brougham Wagon, an estate which wasn’t the largest North American car of its time but nevertheless approached even the Bugatti Royale in length.

Based on Chrysler’s full-size C body platform, it measured 5827mm, which puts it very slightly ahead of the longest Bentley.

The Grand Safari was a vast station wagon produced in two generations for most of the 1970s. It reached its longest form in the middle of the decade, when it measured 5875mm.

This was eventually considered to be a bit too much. The second Grand Safari, introduced for the 1977 model year, was considerably shorter.

Oldsmobile produced models known as 98, Ninety-Eight or Ninety Eight from the early 1940s almost to the turn of the century. In every generation, this was the largest and most luxurious Olds, and followers of motoring trends won’t be surprised to hear that it reached its greatest length in 1974.

For that year and the one after, the Ninety-Eight (as it was then called) reached 5903mm, a figure the brand was never to match for the rest of its existence.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Bugatti produced a car so expensive that it found disappointingly few buyers even among European royalty. The exact dimensions of the Royale are difficult to pin down, because there were several body styles, but the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan says that its example is 5918mm long.

The third (and current) Bugatti company rather vaguely claims a length of “almost 6.5 metres” – or about 21 feet, more or less – for the first Royale sold to a customer.

Some US manufacturers produced their longest models in the 1970s, before retreating from (and never reverting to) the idea as customer demand switched to slightly smaller and more economical vehicles.

For Buick, the extreme case was the Electra, which in 1975 reached 5936mm. Buick has not produced a longer vehicle since then, and almost certainly never will.

The long-wheelbase version of today’s Phantom is an enormous car, but it’s actually slightly shorter than its predecessor, which made its debut in 2003.

That one was 6084mm long, a figure unmatched by any other production Rolls-Royce.

Daimler brought back the old Maybach name for two colossal luxury cars at the turn of the 21st century. The 57 was substantial enough, but its length was eclipsed by that of the long-wheelbase 62, which measured 6165mm.

The Maybach brand was discontinued after it became clear that these cars were never going to sell in profitable numbers. The name is now used only for special versions of top-end Mercedes models, one of which we’ll be coming to in due course.

For several years, the longest Nissan was a long-wheelbase version of the first-generation Titan pickup truck. Introduced in 2007, four years after Titan production began, it measured 6203mm.

Nissan has since broken its own record by a very small margin. The longest current Titan is the off-road-specific XD Crew Cab PRO-4X. Other Titan XDs are similar in size, but this one beats them all with a length of 6208mm (244.4in).

Cadillac’s Fleetwood 75 was already a monster when it was introduced for the 1971 model year. Styling changes, some of them forced by new safety regulations, made it even longer, and by the middle of the decade the car had reached 6406mm.

Vehicles based on the related Commercial Chassis were even longer, but these were usually hearses and ambulances bodied by specialist coachbuilders rather than production models available to the public.

To find the longest Toyota you have to investigate the lower slopes of the current Tundra range. The relatively modest SR and SR5 trim levels are the only ones which include a Double Cab body style with an 8.1-foot load bed, and in this configuration they are 6413mm long.

Better-equipped Tundras are also available, but none of them can be specified with the 8.1-foot bed, and they are consequently shorter.

The longest production car to wear a Mercedes badge is even more enormous than the long-wheelbase version of the celebrated Grosser 600 of the 1960s. That gargantuan machine measured 6240mm and therefore made the much later 5875mm Mercedes-AMG G 63 6x6 look positively abbreviated.

But the Grosser is in turn dominated by the Mercedes-Maybach Pullman, which is based on the current S-Class. At 6499mm it’s even longer than some full-size American pickups.

HD, or Heavy Duty, pickups are less popular in North America than their smaller equivalents, but unlike Medium Duty trucks (which are, confusingly, much larger) they are still bought by private customers.

The current 2500 and 3500 Heavy Duty models with a Crew Cab body and an 8-foot box are the longest ever designed for private buyers, at 6626mm.

GMC has been producing slightly altered versions of Chevrolet trucks for many decades. The equivalent to the current Silverado HD is the Sierra HD, which is as near mechanically identical as makes no difference.

Oddly, though, GMC quotes the length of Crew Cab, Long Bed Sierra as 6759mm, making it larger than the Silverado by about the length of an adult head louse.

The Silverado is available in both Light and Heavy Duty versions, plus an almost completely unrelated Medium Duty which doesn’t qualify for this list since it’s intended only for commercial use.

Larger even than the Ram mentioned earlier, the Crew Cab, Long Bed versions of the 2500HD and 3500HD Silverado are the longest normally available Chevrolets there have ever been, measuring 6756mm.

The longest truck available to non-business customers in North America is also the longest Ford of that nature.

In long-wheelbase Crew Cab form, the F-Series Super Duty very slightly exceeds the GMC Sierra HD at 6761mm.

If you thought that yet another huge American pickup would bring this list to a close, think again. In the larger of its two forms, the Grand California outdoes them all.

The range is split between the 600 and the 680, whose names express their lengths in centimetres. While several trucks exceed the 600, the 680 is on a whole different level at 6800mm. That’s nearly double the figure for VW’s smallest current model, the 3540mm up! city car.