THE new Mercedes-Benz S-Class has something of the night about it. It is in its high-tech element travelling in the dark, seeing beyond the sweep of its headlights and alerting the driver to cyclists daft enough to be pedalling along without lights, horse-riders trotting home in twilight and nocturnal joggers pounding narrow country lanes apparently determined to prove that near-death experiences are good for one’s health.

The S-Class’s black art is all down to an impressive infra-red vision system, prosaically called “Night View Assist”, which can detect pedestrians or road hazards beyond the normal spread of dipped headlight beams. Carmakers have been dabbling with infra-red technology — long understood and used by the military — for years. Mercedes places the infra-red picture plum in the middle of the instrument cluster. During daylight hours, the area is taken up by a “virtual” speedometer, but at night, the driver can flick a switch for owl mode, replacing the speedo with a screen showing an infra-red picture of the road ahead. A ribbon-type speedometer appears along the bottom of the screen.

My introduction to seeing in the dark without eating a sack of carrots was to view St Moritz by night; not the bit with glitzy boutiques, but an unlit road on the outskirts. And there, suddenly appearing on the infrared screen, were the ethereal outlines of pedestrians that the headlights had not illuminated.

This optional technology, part of Mercedes’s long-term aim of achieving accident-free driving, is yours for £1,330. Also worth considering is Brake Assist PLUS. Radar-based, the system issues a warning if one’s closing speed with the vehicle ahead is too high. If a collision looks likely and the driver hesitates, the car’s “brain” takes action, calculates how much brake force is needed to keep a no-claims bonus intact and applies it, stopping the car if necessary. The Mercedes safety experts reckon that the system (£1,840, including intelligent cruise control and a parking aid) could reduce rear-end collisions by up to 75 per cent.

Night View and Brake Assist PLUS are just two items on the S-Class’s almost bewilderingly long list of advanced electronics. But will all this widgetry be working satisfactorily in ten years’ time, or five? Or even two? Mercedes knows to its considerable cost that quality and reliability — particularly of electronics — are a must for its credibility as one of the world’s foremost car brands and the company completed a test and development programme involving 2,000 drivers (many of them employees) covering about five million miles.

So the new S-Class, on sale in Britain early next year, ought to be exceptionally good. I certainly felt good after driving from Milan to St Moritz in the S500 version, with its newly developed 5.5-litre, 382 horsepower V8 engine, which is £69,770. The immediate impression is of very low noise levels, the comfort of its air-suspension and the car’s ability to accelerate and cruise very quickly in one flowing movement, its seven-speed gearbox usually working almost imperceptibly. In the mountains, the big Merc could be driven very hard without drama — not bad for a semi-limo weighing close to a couple of tonnes. Active body control (ABC) is an option worth having if you enjoy this sort of dashing about.

Engine choice for the UK will include a 3.5-litre, 268bhp V6 petrol S350 (£56,720); a 3-litre V6 diesel S320 CDI (£54,975), which will be the big seller and has even more torque than the S500; and a V12 bi-turbo petrol S600 with 517bhp (£98,270).

The new S-Class has plenty of road presence, although at the back it appears to owe something to the BMW 7 Series. The interior is as spacious and luxurious as you would expect. Air-conditioning is very quiet, seats have almost every form of adjustment known to man — and the COMAND computer system, which looks after navigation, audio, telephone and climate, does not demand a two-day training course. But perhaps I should not have mentioned any of this. One Mercedes executive standing alongside the new creation said: “What we did not want was a bragging car.”

Well, why not? If you’ve got it, flaunt it. And the S-Class has got just about everything.