Features

The designers, however, did. Speaking to M-B's head of exterior design, Steffen Kohl (a man so tall and so colourfully dressed he couldn't really be anything else) the night before we drove the car, we got the very strong idea that his team had spent a lot of time getting this design right.

Steffen talked lovingly about the "generous, wide areas", the "lack of ornamentation", the "nicely reflecting surfaces" - and that, I think, was just to describe the restaurant we were eating dinner at. When we got onto the car, he stepped it up a notch further.

"The concave A-pillar and the wide, quiet hood are two of the key features of the front of this car," he said getting deep into design speak. "As is the classic upright grille design next to the new-tech LED lights. They make the car very cool, very elegant. The status of the car is created by this hard front.

The sexiness is created by the softer rear lines and the small, modest rear lights." He said lots of other stuff and showed us a slide show about the car on his laptop that used landscapes and buildings to illustrate where the OD's design influences had come from. And then he explained how the winning design for the car had come from M-B's Yokohama, Japan design studio, not the German or US one.

All very interesting, for sure. But it still doesn't prepare us for the freight-train-sized visual impact the Ocean Drive hit us with the next day when it rolled up the ramp from the hotel garage and into the shining white light of a Miami morning.

Seeing the car on a show stand had made it melt into the automotive visual noise that filled the halls. Here, in a real-world setting, it has a presence that demands your attention and respect. The only other production car I can think of to have the same guvnor effect is the Phantom.

Sprayed in two subtly different shades of Mercedes' Alubeam metallic paint, the Ocean Drive doesn't just catch the light, it sucks it in, which makes the carbon fibre body appear to glow like the whole thing has just been forged.

To get in you have to first push the tuning fork-style door handles, to release them from their flush-fitting position, then give them a gentle yank. The door swishes open to reveal an S-Class cabin that looks like it's been on holiday.

Instead of the usual relentless tones and semi-tones of blacks and greys, there's brown and cream leather with canvas inserts - very high quality canvas, but canvas all the same - and a similarly upmarket beach lounge type of feel to the rest of it. The wood in the dash is something called Bird's Eye Auburn and looks like the stuff cigar humidors are made of.