There’s no faking the glee in the eyes of Mercedes boss Ola Källenius when he lifts the fabric that’s meant to be disguising the interior of the electric GLC he’s driving me around Stuttgart in.

‘Steve Jobs once said design is not just how it looks – it’s how it works. Here’s a perfect example: this seat adjuster here is so intuitive. It’s a work of art. Aesthetically, even if you know nothing about design, it feels right and it’s beautiful to look at. We spent hours and hours and hours and hours on the detail.’

He’s right. The controls mounted on the GLC’s door, above the opening lever, are clearly derived from those that have been used in several generations of Mercs now, but have acquired an elegant new curviness that makes them look a little Art Deco.

Even more exciting news for some people will be the welcome revelation that two of the most frequently used controls on the steering wheel will be knurled rollers, not fiddly haptic touchsliders.

It is, of course, the CEO’s job to big up his cars, but this one’s particularly close to his heart. ‘They’re very nice, and they have to be – my mother is driving one.’

Källenius is one of the most powerful men in the world, but he really doesn’t want to disappoint his mum. It’s a light-hearted comment, but indicative of his attitude: never lose sight of the customers, and never lose sight of the company’s values.

He’s been at Mercedes for 32 years and has had the top job for six years. That involves dealing with presidents and chancellors, central bankers and safety commissioners. But he doesn’t let that stop him staying close to the cars.

‘Even at the top of the company, the board and myself, we spend an enormous amount of time on product development. We drive the cars, we regularly test prototypes, we drive competitors’ cars. In a product-driven company, it’s about the cars. You MUST be part of that. It would be ridiculous to say that I sign things off, that’s not how it works – it’s the ultimate team sport and it’s the engineers that do the work. But everyone on the board is on a first-name basis with every car that’s launched. There’s nothing that gets launched and it’s a surprise, and I go “Oh, what did they do there?”’

The GLC may be the company’s biggest seller, but he’s well aware that for significant numbers of people the traditional saloons and estates remain the company’s defining vehicles. The electric GLC, set to be unveiled in its finished form at September’s Munich show, will be closely followed by an electric C-Class, and a couple of years later an electric E-Class, both running parallel to combustion cars. It all sounds a long way removed from what the world thought was the plan: go full electric by the end of the decade, with the EQ prefix replacing long-cherished badges.

‘Where is the market [transition] today compared to where most people believed five years ago? In Europe and North America and some other markets it’s definitely slower. In China it’s faster for different reasons. For the foreseeable future, maybe the next 10 years, we think the market will be split. If you’re faced with that, during that 10 years, maybe more, you have to have a portfolio that caters to both groups. To make that handle-able from an investment point of view and a complexity point of view, you need to have a very strong strategy.’

That includes an increasingly modular approach to component sharing, and greater flexibility in the factories. ‘We can build, on the same line, the icon product, the S-Class, and also the EQS – they’re both on the same line. We have created that flexibility already and now we’re profiting from it.’

He continues: ‘We’re kind of ready for anything. I don’t want to downplay the challenge. It is hard work. I’ve been with this company 32 years and I’ve never seen a situation where you have so many moving parts at the same time. And there are a few other things happening in the world, such as trade policies and other details impacting not only our industry but everything that is going on.’

Chauffering CAR in the pre-production GLC, he’s keen to mention that, like all future Mercs, it will be available with a full-width screen. ‘One of my favourite features, and I have it today in my EQS SUV, is you can you put on that [passenger] side your personalised picture. I have in my car a photo of our summer house in Sweden. It’s a happy place, and it makes the car that little bit more personalised.’

Warming to his theme, he emphasises the importance of making Mercs easy to live with: ‘We were the first ones to perfect rear-axle steering, with the S-Class and the EQS and so on. I live in Stuttgart in a very narrow street, where I always up until that point had to go back and forth, especially if someone has parked in an awkward position opposite my entrance. I can go in an S-Class and EQS in one go now.’

Safety remains hugely important. ‘The ride and drive of a Mercedes needs to feel safe. It’s performance, but it’s a grown-up performance. It feels safe, you have this fantastic level of comfort, and at the same time the car feels tight. That is Mercedes engineering. We’ve focused a lot on efficiency in this new generation of e-drivetrain. That whole [CLA EV] drivetrain is now transported into an SUV. Okay, the drag coefficient costs some range, but for an SUV it’s very, very good.

‘This feeling that if you close your eyes, you know it’s a Mercedes – that’s from the quality of chassis tuning, the body integrity and the safety. I don’t believe there’s a car company in the world that comes close to crushing as many cars as Mercedes. And for every crash we do hundreds of thousands of simulations.

‘You’re always looking for efficiencies, the better design, you never stop, we haven’t stopped in 139 years. Those core values go back to Gottlieb Daimler and Carl Benz. Those two individuals changed the world.’

What does he think when he sees a Merc on the road? ‘I feel a sense of pride. Working for Mercedes is more than a contract and a pay cheque at the end of the month.’

The Swede is the first non-German to run Mercedes, and is proudly internationalist in his outlook: ‘We have a high sense of responsibility as a well established large industrial group, but for many decades now that goes well beyond the borders of this country or this region. We long ago replaced “Made in Germany” with “Made by Mercedes-Benz”. If you walk into one of our factories – and in my earlier career I was part of the team building up the SUV factory in Alabama – or walk into Beijing or East London or South Africa, you know it. We run the same standard everywhere. We want to be a good neighbour, not just in Sindelfingen, we want to be a good neighbour in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, everywhere. We integrate into the society in which we operate. You may be a global company but you also have a local profile.’