Following hints at a new emphasis on ‘sensual purity’ that have been teased for months, Mercedes unveiled its Concept A Sedan at the Shanghai Auto Show. The car represents a new emphasis on form, and a striking sense of fluidity, while dropping the flourishes which have marked automotive design fashion for the last decade.

Design may be the convergence of functionality and expression. But, to quote Daimler’s Chief Design Officer Gorden Wagener, from a Mercedes press release of some months back: ‘Design is also the art of omission: the days of creases are over.’ Wagener speaks of purism, and a new paradigm of automotive design aesthetics, as the end to such flourishes. An end to hard lines that overtly define beginnings and endings. For Mr. Wagener and his gambit, an end to the creases crisis…if you will.

And this new fluidity of design is very appealing. The Concept A evokes continuation and cycle, a sense of naturalistic process, in its lack of defining absolutes. Its lines sweep into currents of air. In the original, sculptural vision, the concept was envisioned as purely liquid form.

The Concept A Sedan can’t quite boast that degree of suggestion, of course, but it comes very close. Angles are not sophist reductions, in the working model. They are evocations. The result is elegant and puckish, fleet-looking, and very contemporary.

If the Concept A moves into production, Mercedes may well be spearheading a new overall direction in the industry. If it sells, the company may again assert itself as a design iconoclast.