Rod Stewart is tailing us. We’ve clocked him twice today, cruising about Miami in a black Mercedes CLK AMG convertible, and both times he’s affected that classic ‘nothing to see here’ look into the middle distance. The cockatoo-haired crooner isn’t fooling anyone, though: we can tell he’s been having a good stare.
And, frankly, who could blame him? Plenty of other people have as well. The thing attracting all this attention is, officially, only a concept car called the Ocean Drive. In reality, it’s the early warning shot for an S-Class convertible - not a Maybach, despite the rumours - that ought to arrive in the Mercedes range at some point around 2010.
[Inline image gallery]
This feature was first published in Issue 168 of Top Gear magazine (2007)
Images: Lee Brimble
From Detroit concept to S-Class convertible plans
When Mercedes first wheeled it out at the Detroit show last January, we were told there was only a 30 per cent chance it would ever be built. The line at the time was simple: limited resources mean only so many projects can be pushed into development simultaneously. That was also before Mercedes scraped Chrysler off its corporate footwear.
Now that the profit-sapping partnership is history, Mercedes-Benz can stop fretting about what seat fabric rental customers in Illinois expect in a Sebring, and refocus on what it’s properly good at: building luxury cars for well-heeled corporate types. The sort of machines that cosset you and shut the world outside out. In other words, exactly the sort of car an Ocean Drive-based S-Class convertible would be.
Ocean Drive design: details that actually work
Calling the concept after Miami’s best-known beachfront cruise - a strip made famous by Miami Vice and, more recently, treated to a dubious cover by FPU - is a touch of a red herring. Because unlike the flaky paint and flickering neon of the buildings facing the sea, absolutely everything on this car functions. Everything. There are none of the stuck-on paper gauges or placeholder graphics you usually find on show cars. Every switch is linked to real hardware and delivers precisely what the little symbol suggests it should. I’ve driven pre-production test cars thrown together with less care than this.
Perhaps that shouldn’t be shocking, because underneath it’s essentially a full-production, V12-powered S600. It also borrows most of that car’s structure, which explains why - despite the first impression that it’s longer and wider - it’s almost identical in length and width to the saloon. It also explains why it drives so cleanly. This wasn’t a case of engineers sacrificing their coffee breaks to make it happen.
The designers, on the other hand, clearly did. When we spoke the night before our drive with Mercedes-Benz head of exterior design, Steffen Köhl (a man so tall and so vividly dressed he could hardly be anything else), it was obvious his team had sweated the details.
Steffen was enthusiastic about the “generous, wide areas”, the “lack of ornamentation”, the “nicely reflecting surfaces” - and for a moment I wondered whether he was describing the restaurant we were eating in. Once he moved on to the car, he cranked the intensity up.
“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 had plenty more to add, plus a laptop slideshow that used scenery and architecture to explain where the Ocean Drive’s influences came from. He also told us the chosen design had emerged from Mercedes-Benz’s Yokohama studio in Japan, rather than the German or US teams.
All of it was genuinely interesting. None of it, though, quite prepares you for the sheer freight-train visual impact the Ocean Drive delivers the next morning as it climbs the ramp out of the hotel garage and into Miami’s bright, white daylight.
At Detroit, under show lighting and surrounded by everything else, it more or less dissolved into the background noise of the motor show. Out here in the real world it has a presence that more or less demands attention - and a bit of deference. The only production car that springs to mind with a similar guvnor aura is the Phantom.
Finished in two subtly different tones of Mercedes’ Alubeam metallic paint, the Ocean Drive doesn’t merely catch the light; it seems to pull it in. The carbon-fibre body looks as though it’s glowing, as if the whole car has just come out of the forge.
Inside the Ocean Drive: materials, rear doors and the soft-top
Getting aboard is a small ritual. You press the tuning-fork-style door handles to pop them out of their flush position, then give them a gentle tug. The door opens with a smooth swish, and you’re greeted by an S-Class interior - but one that looks as if it’s been on a proper holiday.
Instead of the usual strict palette of blacks and greys, you get brown and cream leather mixed with canvas inserts. It’s very high-quality canvas, but canvas all the same, and it gives the whole cabin an upmarket beach-lounge vibe. Across the fascia is a wood finish called Bird’s Eye Auburn, and it has the look of something you’d expect on an expensive cigar humidor.
That’s the view from the front seats. In the back there’s acres more leather and canvas, plus two screens for rear passengers to watch inflight movies - complete with, for the first time in a Mercedes, their own set of COMAND controls to run all the important functions. There’s a champagne-flute dispenser between the seats as well, although that isn’t the headline.
The headline is the two extra doors.
For the first time since the four-door Lincoln Continental convertible bowed out in 1967 - it might have happened earlier if the beautiful replacement concept, like a four-wheeled Harley-Davidson, had reached production - rear passengers don’t have to clamber past the front seats. They get their own doors. Not even the Rolls Drop-dead Gorgeous Coupe can offer that.
Like that big open Rolls, though, the Ocean Drive uses a fabric roof. To keep the proportions looking right, and to save weight and boot space, it avoids folding metal roofs in favour of a sail-sized 3.2 m² cloth top. And it doesn’t suffer for it.
People who buy land-yachts of this sort aren’t especially worried about someone breaking in or attempting to nick the car - two of the main arguments for going with a hardtop. They’ll simply ring the garage and have another car delivered. Then they’ll dispatch their ‘people’ to kneecap the unfortunate soul who tried it on.
Driving down Ocean Drive: attention, fame and Rod again
And if our short drive in the Ocean Drive, down Ocean Drive, is anything to go by, there won’t be a shortage of people tempted to do exactly that. We had a police escort to halt traffic, but it barely mattered. The car handled the crowd control itself. Drivers, pedestrians and cyclists alike stopped dead the moment they saw it.
If you’ve ever wondered what being famous feels like, a single run in this car will answer the question. Seconds after you appear, you can almost see the wave passing through the people on the pavement as they realise something important is coming. That important something is the Ocean Drive.
“What the hell is that car, mister?” says one guy above the shrieking exhaust note of his over-stressed moped as he tries to keep up and take a picture with his mobile, all at the same time. I consider explaining that it’s a concept, but there isn’t the opportunity. So I just say, “expensive”, and disappear up the road.
Hiding around the next corner, we spot Rod again, slipping away up the street. He probably wants to ask the very same question, but he’s not hanging about to do it. Maybe he’s shy, maybe he’s busy - or maybe he’s seen enough, and he’s already hurrying to his dealer to discuss trading in his once-sexy, now thoroughly ordinary-looking CLK AMG convertible…
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