It is no more a styling rotunda than an operating theater, no more an operating theater than a NASA clean room, no more a clean room than an enormous, hushed jewel case.
It is gray carpeted and wood panelled. Between this enormous round room and a clawing, dirty, seething world there are, by rough guess, five buildings, 30 walls and perhaps 100 feet of insulation. And of course the fences—the one of cyclone wire around the Daimler-Benz executive offices in Sindelfingen, a suburb of Stuttgart—and the more formidable fence of corporate reputation which is of the most fearsomely efficient car company in the universe.
In this room then, in this rotunda, are a cluster of men and four cars. The men are in two groups. One, the larger, is a…