The Brabus Bodo Cabriolet is one of the last new open-top V12 grand tourers
Brabus has taken the roof off the Bodo. The open V12 grand tourer it just built is nearly a museum piece.
We have already met the Bodo. A few weeks ago Brabus revealed it as a 1,000 pk coachbuilt hyper-GT, its tribute to founder Bodo Buschmann and, unusually for the world's most famous Mercedes tuner, built on an Aston Martin Vanquish. Now comes the inevitable second act: the Bodo Cabriolet, the same car with the roof removed. It looks like a simple variant, and in engineering terms it mostly is. But step back and the open-top Bodo is a quietly remarkable object, because a brand-new, front-engined, twelve-cylinder grand tourer with a folding roof is one of the rarest things you can buy in 2026, a format the industry has all but stopped making.
What changes when the roof folds away
Mechanically, the Cabriolet mirrors the coupe almost exactly, which is no bad thing. It keeps the 5.2-litre biturbo V12 tuned to a round 1,000 pk and 1,200 Nm, good for 0 to 100 km/h in 3.0 seconds, 0 to 200 in 8.5, and a top speed pegged at 360 km/h. The carbon-fibre bonnet, the Brabus grille with 13 vertical slats, the matrix LED headlights, the multi-stage deployable rear spoiler and the 77 badge for the firm's 1977 founding all carry over, as does the strict run of 77 cars. What the Cabriolet adds is a folding fabric roof and the thing that really sells a car like this: open-air, wind-in-the-hair, twelve-cylinder theatre, with the exhaust note pouring straight in rather than filtering through a fixed roof. It is reportedly priced around 1.5 million euros, or roughly 1.7 million dollars at its Pebble Beach debut, and Brabus has not confirmed deliveries.
The open twelve-cylinder GT is almost gone
Here is why the roof matters more than it should. Try to name a brand-new, front-engined, twelve-cylinder convertible grand tourer you can order today, and the list is startlingly short. Ferrari still builds one in the V12 12Cilindri Spider, and Aston Martin offers the Vanquish Volante the Bodo is based on. After that, you are almost out of options. The old giants of this exact niche have walked away: Mercedes no longer sells any V12 sports car or convertible at all, having pulled back from big engines to the point of ruling a V8 revival in and out, and Bentley has just ended the W12 that powered generations of open Continental grand tourers. The drop-top twelve, once the definitive statement of European luxury speed, has shrunk to a whisper.
So the tribute had to be British
Line those facts up and the choice of donor stops being a curiosity and becomes the whole story. Brabus, a German house that built its name making Mercedes go faster, wanted to honour its founder with an open twelve-cylinder grand tourer, the most romantic body style its world has ever produced. And to build one in 2026, it could not shop at home, because no German maker will sell it the ingredients anymore. It had to go to Aston Martin, one of the last companies on earth still building new twelve-cylinder cars on purpose. The Bodo coupe made that point in passing. The Cabriolet, in the single format the Germans have most completely abandoned, makes it impossible to miss.
A gorgeous car, and a farewell in disguise
None of this is a knock on the car, which is spectacular, or on the sentiment, which is genuine; Bodo Buschmann built a global luxury house from a tuning workshop, and an open 1,000 pk V12 is a fitting way to remember him. Brabus has strayed beyond Mercedes before, and the Aston it chose is a magnificent base. Seventy-seven cars for the ultra-wealthy will not move the wider market. But it is worth seeing the Cabriolet for what it also is: not just a variant, but very possibly one of the final open-top twelve-cylinder grand tourers to be created at all. Cars like this are not being replaced when they end. When the format goes, it goes for good, and the Bodo Cabriolet is arriving already wearing the air of a last hurrah.
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The coupe earned its headlines with a big number and a surprising badge underneath. The Cabriolet is the more revealing of the two, because its significance is not in the specification at all; it is in the body style. An open, front-engined, twelve-cylinder grand tourer used to be the natural top of the range for half of Europe's great marques. Now it is a niche kept alive by two makers and a handful of coachbuilders, and a car this extravagant reaching the market almost feels like an accident of timing, a format catching one last golden hour before the light goes.
So enjoy the Bodo Cabriolet for the outrageous thing it is, but read it clearly too. When the most resourceful tuner in Germany has to leave the country to build an open V12, and chooses to do it precisely as that recipe disappears, the car becomes a marker as much as a machine. It says, in rose gold and hand-shaped aluminium, that the open twelve-cylinder grand tourer is nearly over, and that the people who love these cars most are now in the business of building monuments to them. Wind down the roof while there is still a V12 up front to hear.
