Thirty years ago, there was another S-Class Benz on this very fleet. It was an S500 of the W140 generation: silver paint, V8 motor, keys guarded very closely by one S. Cropley Esq, who remains of this parish to this day. But I was able to wrench them from his grip once, because Jaguar was launching the new Daimler Double Six and we had to do a twin test with the world’s best luxury car. Which the S-Class was.

The good news for me was the launch was in Biarritz. But it was also on Valentine’s Day, so I drove down overnight with my then girlfriend (now wife) in the passenger seat and promptly fell in love – with the car, you understand. I still regard successfully smuggling my other half onto a two-day car launch one of the greater achievements of my career.

Ever since, that car has set the standard against which all mainstream luxury cars, and S-Classes in particular, have been measured in general, at least in my mind. And while some have been quicker, quieter and doubtless even more sybaritically comfortable, none has yet managed to suffuse me with quite the same sense of supreme well-being achieved by that old W140. Cropley still gets misty eyed about it to this day, and rightly so.

So that’s the job here, of this top-of- the-range, flag-waving, all-singing, all-dancing new S-Class, which is mine for the next few months. It comes with a wheelbase almost as long as its name, denoting it to be the one that sits at the top of the pile, the numero uno, the majordomo of the S-Class household. It also has, and this is the crucial bit, a plug-in hybrid drive.