This Wild Motorhome Looks Like Something A Kid Drew, And Yet Somehow It’s A Real Thing

There have been some really weird and shocking motorhomes throughout history, from the Maillet Rando-Car to the DayStar St. Tropez coach. Few weird RVs can hold a candle to what I’m about to show you. This is the Marchi Mobile eleMMent Palazzo Superior. This $3 million monstrosity looks like a concept someone sketched out for fun, but it’s actually a real thing and they very rarely come up for sale.

This news comes to us from Carscoops, and I remember reading stories about these motorhomes many years ago. Indeed, an Internet search for “Marchi Mobile” does reveal some really old stories. However, what I completely missed is that this European firm didn’t just make some silly concepts and then disappear into the night. It actually put these bizarre motorhomes into something resembling production, and then perhaps fizzled out.

Calling a Marchi Mobile eleMMent Palazzo Superior “bizarre,” might be an understatement. Oh, and yes, the company really does spell it “eleMMent.” Don’t worry, I didn’t hit my head on anything today. There’s not a component of this coach that you can say is normal. It basically has two floors, the world’s weirdest windshield, three windshield wipers that spin like a fan, and a dashboard that doesn’t make a lick of sense. Marchi Mobile even has a bus version (below) and a semi-tractor version in case you want to shock everyone while delivering a load.

Born From A Mad Designer

But what even is a Marchi Mobile? The motorhome on your screen is technically the achievement of two men, the legendary Luigi Colani and Mario Marchi. Marchi grew up as a gearhead, and when he became an adult, he worked as a driver in his father’s trucking company. Later, Marchi took his passion for trucking and turned it into a career designing unique truck parts. This branch of Marchi’s big rig love became the Marchi Group in 2002, where he constructed custom trucks and trailers. Even back then, CNN Travel writes, Marchi made some seriously weird trucks to push the envelope.

Somewhere along the line, Marchi became enamored by the works of Luigi Colani, specifically of some prototype trucks built by the famed designer. Of course, noted fan of weird design, Jason, has written about the legend of Colani before:

While Colani was a successful designer of all sorts of things, from cameras to toilets, his transportation-related designs—cars and motorcycles and aircraft and trains and boats and almost every other sort of vehicle—were arguably less successful. The reason is that Colani designed according to his only set of rules and beliefs, and those rarely intersected with actual reality. And that’s precisely why it was so good to have him around.

Colani, for whatever else you might say about him, was not boring. At all. Colani’s transportation designs all sprung from his unifying design theory, which he termed “biodynamic,” a synthesis of rounded biomorphic forms meshed with a sort of aesthetic streamlining, a sleek techno-utopianism, and, I suppose, more than a little middle-aged horniness:

“Soft shapes follow us through life. Nature does not make angles. Hips and bellies and breasts — all the best designers have to do with erotic shapes and fluidity of form.”

Colani printed out an impressive portfolio of bombastic vehicles throughout his life, but some of the weirdest were his trucks. One was the 1978 Colani Truck 2001. That truck represented a radical design to increase aerodynamic efficiency by a huge margin. Colani’s truck had something of a helicopter cabin for its cab and the front end of a sports car below, and the reported result was a drag coefficient of 0.4 and a reduction in fuel consumption of 25 percent, which is incredible for a big rig.

But Colani never really gave up on the hyper-efficient truck concept, and in 1989, he came out swinging with the next generation of the Colani Truck 2001. This one was even sleeker with a coefficient of drag of just 0.38. This truck did a promotional tour of Europe and America, where once again it failed to capture a market. At least one Colani Truck 2001 was turned into the Utah 12, a nod to Colani’s “Utah” series of Bonneville Salt Flat racers.

You have to give Colani some credit because even though his designs failed to live up to their promises of revolutionizing trucking, he never gave up. His truck concepts were further refined into the 1995 Mercedes-Benz Vision 2005 Truck, the 2001 DAF Aero 3000 Truck, and the 2002 Colani Spitzer-Silo Truck. Colani kept punching out different hyper aerodynamic truck designs until his death in 2019.

All of these trucks promised ridiculous fuel economy gains and also unrivaled outward visibility for their drivers. Yet, like many of the vehicles Colani penned over his six-decade career, they were perhaps too astounding to become production vehicles.

Well, that was until Marchi came around, who decided that Colani’s designs needed to become more than just beautiful one-off vehicles. He started sketching the design for the first eleMMent in 2005 and then, with the help of a team, built it in 2010. That year also marked the founding of Marchi Holding AG. The Austria-based company specializes in the construction of special vehicles for marketing or for healthcare, but it’s also the parent company of Marchi’s motorhome effort.

Marchi says that it has been producing motorhomes and semi-trucks since 2012. It hasn’t released production numbers, but it sounds like there are at least a handful out there. Yet, the company has also gone off the radar. Its last site update was in 2019, and its last post to social media was in 2020. Perhaps the most ominous is the fact that the company’s email, info@marchi-mobile.com, is dead. The company also hasn’t returned contact through other means.

Carscoops reported that two examples are for sale, however, there’s a catch. Two units are listed for sale on the luxury marketplace James Edition. But here’s the thing: Both units were listed in 2019 and were last confirmed to be for sale in 2022, so I wouldn’t hold high hopes here. I don’t want to say that Marchi Mobile is dead, but it certainly appears like it is.

Update: As a reader helpfully pointed out, Marchi Mobile Holding AG itself is still around and still appears to have operating subsidiaries. So, only the motorhome division appears to be neglected and stuck in 2019.

A Supercar, Helicopter, RV, And Jet In One

Still, I can’t stop staring at these motorhomes, because it’s almost hard to believe that someone had the cojones to actually build the bloody things.

The eleMMent series is divided into two models, the Palazzo Exclusive and the Palazzo Superior. Both coaches are basically the same, but the Exclusive doesn’t have the fly bridge or multiple slides. Marchi says that its coaches feature cabs with a blend of different vehicle designs in one. The top of the cab is meant to resemble a helicopter cabin, and the rotary wiper blades of the earlier models only add to the bizarre helicopter look. Sadly, the later model, below, has just one wiper.

Check out the cab of the earlier version!

The bottom of the cab is supposed to resemble a supercar. Marchi also says that the Palazzo cabs were made out of fiberglass in the early years, but the company switched to carbon fiber in later years. From the company:

The cab’s striking appearance is ahead of its time and was manufactured with extreme precision using high performance carbon fiber materials. Its sports car design lines and 36-inch rim covers resemble those of the latest race cars. The cockpit features a central digital instrumentation and MMI control inspired by jet cockpits, but functions like a luxury limousine. The panoramic, helicopter-like windshield can be darkened in two stages using an adjustable sun protection system.

The body construction emphasizes the strong design statement of the eleMMent series while also offering outstanding functionality and comfort. We have chosen a very complex body construction manufacturing process which exceeds the needs of mobile homes by far. Its self-supporting and incredibly robust structure with a 60+ mm wall thickness provides outstanding stability and an insulation rating comparable to expedition vehicles operated on extreme off-road terrains. However, the design lines remain elegant with integrated yacht windows and fine chrome trim to include indirect lighting.

That’s right! These coaches, which would have cost you up to around $4 million, were supposed to be available with 36-inch wheel covers.

In the past, Palazzo coaches were DAF trucks underneath and featured headlights from Mercedes-Benz A-Class cars, but newer examples rode on Volvo chassis. Specifically, Marchi says that a newer Palazzo is powered by a Volvo straight-six tuned to up to 600 HP. This setup is good for a top speed of 93 mph. According to the spec sheet, the 45-foot motorhome weighs up to 28 tons. Assuming those are metric tons, that’s a whopping 61,729 pounds. Yet, Marchi says that the motorhome has 20 percent lower fuel consumption compared to a typical Class A motorhome because of its ridiculous shape and drag coefficient of 0.36.

As I said above, there was also a Marchi truck, and that one was called the MMpro. The MMpro had the same front end and Volvo powertrain as the motorhomes, but instead of a camper body, it’s built to haul a semi-trailer. Marchi said that the MMpro was built to haul any standard semi-trailer and could have been ordered in 4×2, 6×2, or 6×4 configurations. I would have loved to see one of those 6x4s!

Going back to the motorhome, the body was just as ridiculous as the rest of the truck. From Marchi:

The Sky Lounge is one of the true highlights of the eleMMent palazzo superior. Extraordinary and exclusively reserved for the owner’s outstanding panoramic views, its automatic lift system raises it up out of the body to create a walled-in roof deck. An exterior stairwell leads up to the spacious deck with integrated lounge furniture and radiant floor heating. We focused on the interior design to create a true “home away from home” for owners accustomed to only the highest standards. A specially developed air convection system ensures a comfortable interior temperature and even prevents excess pressurization when sliding out the full-wall room extensions. Different temperature zones can be programmed and a continuous air circulation system ensures the best air quality at all times.

The floor plan of the eleMMent palazzo superior will disprove any pre-existing stereotypes of mobile homes. Its purposeful engineering has created a living space that provides maximum comfort for owners and guests. One of the most outstanding features is a 4-meter couch within reach of a bar, a wine cabinet and an icemaker, not to mention a large TV screen across the room. The open kitchenette adds to the spacious interior atmosphere.

The bathroom is discretely separated from the living room and master bedroom and can be entered from either without seeming like a passageway between the two rooms. The large master bedroom features a king-size bed, manufactured by the same company that supplies beds to the British royal family and is considered the most comfortable in the world. The fine Italian bed linen is of highest quality. The bedroom furnishings not only provide ample storage capacity but also a dressing table and a large-screen TV. An adjoining spa area provides a private retreat for the owners and features a 1.5 sqm glazed rainfall shower. Also, light therapy, architectural mirrors and special surfaces create a serene atmosphere reserved for the elite few.

These rigs came with two generators, a 211-gallon fresh water tank, a 211-gallon grey tank, and a 66-gallon waste tank. Additional luxuries include a bidet, a tower dryer, and two Steinway & Lyngdorf surround sound systems. Every single part of these things is stupid and ridiculous. Yes, mega RVs like these are symbols of excess just like private jets. But hey, at least these are a lot cooler than a multi-million-dollar Prevost.

When these motorhomes were new, Marchi said that they had a starting price of around $2 million and topped out at around $4 million. However, Marchi also took totally custom orders, so the total price was really just how much pain your bank account was willing to take. Since these RVs are so incredibly rare and already require you to be a millionaire to afford, I bet you could even import one into the United States, too.

Sadly, it’s unclear just how many of these things were produced, but it looks like there are at least some out there, including the two that Marchi tried to sell in 2019. Marchi was also trying to make a huge push to plant its stakes in the American market, where the uber-rich have no problem spending over a million dollars on a motorhome.

It’s also not exactly known what happened to this company. Marchi even claimed to have been producing spare parts for the motorhomes it had already assembled. Still, it’s so awesome to see Luigi Colani’s work put into production. Maybe with some luck, I might see one of these things one day. Now, I want to see someone make a Colani truck that a regular person can afford.

Top graphic image: Marchi Mobile