The doors went up again.

Gorden Wagener has never been shy about the ambition. “Our goal at Mercedes-Benz is not to do styling,” he said at the reveal. “Our goal is to create icons. To me, that makes the difference between mainstream design and luxury.” The two he named as ancestors — the 300 SL and the C111 — share one feature, and the new car takes it: doors hinged at the roof, opening toward the sky.

The borrowings from 1969 are specific and deliberate. The low rectangular element across the nose, with its rounded ends, is where the C111 carried a closed panel and round foglamps. The black intakes let into the hood are lifted almost directly. The C111's black lower bodyshell returns as what Mercedes calls the keel line: matte black blades running under the sills, pierced and backlit in blue so the car reads as fused to the road.

What it does not do is copy. The strongly profiled U-shaped front apron has no precedent on the old car. The gullwings have no visible release hardware at all. The side glass is opaque from outside, camouflaged in a pixel pattern. And that low front panel only looks like a grille — it is a flexible display with a three-dimensional pixel structure, able to throw a message to whoever is standing in front of the car.

“It's inspired by the C111,” Wagener told Sharp, “but it's a very modern, contemporary interpretation of that car. And this is what we do with everything. We're always looking back as a source of inspiration.”

Mercedes calls it the first sports car interior with a lounge concept, and the claim rests on an engineering fact rather than a styling whim: because the motors are small, the cabin could be pushed backwards into space a mid-engined car has never had. There are two states. In race mode, the backrests come upright and a compact driver-facing touchscreen swings into view — a minimalist driving machine. In lounge mode, the seats melt into a single sculpture that runs from sill to center tunnel to luggage compartment.

The cushions sit flush in the floor, which gives the first impression of a Formula 1 tub — except that here, unlike in a racing car, the backrest angle adjusts. The upholstery is silver diamond quilting; the harness is orange and has four points.

The materials are the quiet argument. Dashboard and large surfaces are a honeycomb-textured fabric in 100 percent recycled polyester; the armrests and parcel shelf are orange leather tanned with coffee bean husks; the steering wheel spokes, the armrest straps and the floor-hinged pedals are polished aluminum.

Across the dash runs a slender pixel display, deliberately coarse, showing digital art as a rasterized stream of QR codes in the manner of an early-digital news ticker. Its glass pixels shift color with your viewing angle; the sharp version of whatever it is showing appears on the small high-resolution screen beside the wheel. Mercedes describes the whole thing carefully as a further interpretation of the MBUX Hyperscreen — not the article itself.