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Rod Stewart is following us. Seen him twice today sloping around Miami in a black Mercedes CLK AMG convertible and both times he's pretended to be looking the other way. But the cockatoo-haired crooner's fooling no one: we know he's been checking us out.

Can't blame him really - everyone else has too. That's because we've been cruising the Art Deco streets, warmed by blasts of hot air skimming off the bath-temperature azure blue ocean, past crowds of walking melanomas, in a car with a more potent sex appeal than all of the gravel-voiced rocker's wives and girlfriends put together. Rod, to mangle some of his lyrics, definitely thinks it's sexy and clearly wants its body.

This object of desire is currently only a concept called the Ocean Drive. But actually it's the precursor to the S-Class convertible - not a Maybach, as some had suggested - that should be joining the Merc line-up sometime around 2010.

When we first saw the car at the Detroit show last January, Mercedes said there was only a 30 per cent chance of it making it into production. The excuse then was that finite resources only allow so many cars to be developed at any given time. But that was said before Mercedes wiped Chrysler off its corporate shoe.

With that profit-dissolving partnership now behind them, M-B can stop worrying about what seat trim road warriors in Illinois want in their rental Sebrings and get back to the business it knows best: making luxury cars for well-heeled corporate types.

Cars that cuddle their occupants and blot out reality. Cars, in other words, just like an S-Class convertible based on the Ocean Drive.

Naming the concept car after the main seaside cruise in Miami - and a track used in Miami Vice, recently subject to a dodgy cover version by FPU - is a little misleading. Because unlike the peeling-paint, flickering-neon lit buildings that face out towards the ocean, everything on the car works.

Everything. There's none of the glued-on paper dials or temporary graphics you normally get on a concept. All the switches connect to real machinery that does what the switch icon promises. I've driven pre-production prototypes that were built worse than this.

But maybe that shouldn't be such a surprise - the Ocean Drive is, mechanically, a full-production V12-powered S600. Structurally it shares most of that car's chassis, too, which, despite first impressions that it's longer and wider, explains why it's almost exactly the same length and width as the saloon.

And why it drives perfectly. So it's not like the engineers had to miss a coffee break to get this one done.