The newest concept from Mercedes-Benz resurrects a former concept, or series of them: the C 111 cars that emerged from the company’s designers in the early 1970s. The automaker calls the new experimental EV the Vision One-Eleven, and it attempts to further the previous project work as it updates it for the 2020s. The resulting concept vehicle is an avant-garde statement; strikingly mercurial-looking, it conjures the oceanic forms targeted by the automaker’s design team perhaps more than any other.

Mercedes refers to the overall shape of the Vision One-Eleven ‘one-bow design’: a unity of form and function without any seams at all. Fusion, perhaps. The company uses the word ‘muscular,’ but it’s the nebulous quality of the Vision One-Eleven’s form that induces curiosity. Then the iconic Merc gullwing doors are up, and the entire shape becomes accessible.

The car’s powertrain is all electric, but Mercedes doesn’t go into detail but for the mentioning of an ‘innovative YASA axial-flux high-tech electric motor’ fed by a battery with ‘liquid-cooled cylindrical’ cells. There is, however, a quick abstract motion picture on the site which the company has titled ‘evolution’ intended to say it all, in which a horse, the C 111 gas-burner and the new EV concept are juxtaposed in a linear generational line.

Not surprisingly, the cabin is prepped for autonomous-driven travel, so the interior is as much den as cockpit. Merc dressed the whole thing in a fetching combination of apricot and steely metallic tones. In keeping with concept car presentation, details are occasionally playfully theatrical: rounded forms that conjure the sets in a Kubrick sci-fi film or the interiors of a Zaha Hadid-designed residence, and — to reprise the grille of the vehicle for the sake of stylistic cohesion and perhaps motif — a long, slim, rounded dashboard readout inspired by 8-bit for operational vitals.