The Mercedes-Benz Vision Iconic is automotive haute couture, a concept with cinematic style

Mercedes-Benz has gone back to the 1930s for the noirish art deco design inspiration of its Vision Iconic concept; a quietly menacing massive-bonneted electric and autonomous grand tourer. It’s an elegant yet cartoonish machine, and for all its futurism and the svelte ground-hugging lines, it’s easy to imagine Indiana Jones gripping onto the hood emblem for dear life.

Unveiled in Shanghai last week (14 October 2025), the Vision Iconic is Mercedes’ most explicit attempt yet to marry its halcyon pre-war glamour with the cold, clinical logic of 21st-century electrification. This show car is tailored like a black velvet tuxedo: it’s theatrical, impeccably cut, absurdly expensive to make, and immediately convincing.

From a distance, it reads like a sculpture – long-boned, low-slung and deliberately anachronistic. The acres of bonnet – containing what, we don’t know – meet an aerodynamic glasshouse and a neatly tucked rump that narrows into a teardrop silhouette. But above all else, what really grabs the attention is the ‘radiator’ grille.

Drawing inspiration from Mercedes lux-o-barges from the 1960s and 1970s, like the W108, W111 and 600 Pullman, the upright grille has a chrome frame, smoked glass lattice and contour lighting. It can also be animated to display different graphics. If you could drive this car back in time, that might be very useful when communicating with spies hiding in the shadows of the Berlin Wall.

The brooch-like appendage is Mercedes’ rebuttal to the smooth featureless visages of most EVs and a declaration that, even with a heart full of batteries, four-wheeled prestige deserves a face. This follows on from the new GLC and upcoming C-Class, both of which reject subtlety of snout for big light-up boat races.

Inside, there’s more blue velvet than a David Lynch thriller. Lounge-lizard material covers the Elvis-era bench seating, and there are polished brass accoutrements and inlays of mother-of-pearl on the facia and door panels.

The centrepiece of the pillar-to-pillar instrument panel is a floating glass structure that has been dubbed ‘the Zeppelin’, containing analogue-style dials and digital screens – the dials perform mechanical animations before the widescreen display wakes up, and a clock shaped like the three-pointed star doubles as an AI interface.

Mercedes describes the experience within as ‘hyper-analogue digital luxury’. The four-spoke steering wheel looks like it’s been liberated from a speedboat. You can admire the floor, too, clad in elaborate straw marquetry, which was fashionable in the 17th century and was revived in the roaring 1920s. It suggests a future in which touchscreens and artisanal craftsmanship sit side by side.

Period sensibility meets advanced systems thinking when it comes to the paint job, too. That’s not simple black lacquer you see before you. It’s ‘solar paint’, an invisible photovoltaic coating which, via micro-solar modules, can meaningfully top up the car’s electric range. Mercedes say that if they were to slap solar paint onto a mid-size SUV it could produce enough energy for up to 7,500 miles a year.

The concept also introduces a new steer-by-wire system and level-four autonomous tech, complete with a neuromorphic AI computer system designed to mimic the human brain. Fully autonomous driving systems can drain batteries faster than putting your foot down, but this clever system has the ability to reduce the energy required for autonomous driving by 90 per cent. It’s also ten times more efficient at reading the road than non-neuromorphic systems and reacts faster.

These are technologies that’ll be on a production S-Class soon enough. Most interestingly, what the Vision Iconic is foretelling is Mercedes’ embrace of its bullish, bellicose and eccentric heritage, of building spectral sports cars and limos for dictators and people with ‘von’ in their names.

Vintage design is not a trap but a lens through which to sharpen the future. As a piece of couture, the Vision Iconic reminds the world that Germany still knows a thing or two about sending a message of strength.

Vision Iconic, concept only, more information at Mercedes-Benz.com