For a moment, I could barely believe what I was hearing: Mercedes-Benz R&D boss Ola Källenius – a man I have known for many years – telling me that a move to make AMG ‘go all-electric’ was under active consideration.

Could it possibly be true that a brand as famous for its V8s as is Ferrari for its V12s and Porsche for its flat-sixes might soon only be producing cars with nothing more interesting to offer the ear than the whirr of electric motors?

Er, no. It turns out AMG won’t be abandoning the bent-eight anytime soon and that the ‘all-electric’ referred to by Källenius during our Detroit motor show conversation meant that AMG might produce at least some cars powered by nothing else but electricity. So, not all future AMGs will be electric but some might be. Glad we cleared that up.

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Even so, the very idea of an electric AMG provides food for thought. Of course, we have been here before, with the SLS Electric Drive of 2013 (pictured below), but that was really a concept car and engineering testbed of which a small number (a very small number indeed, I'm told) were allocated to certain chosen customers.

If an electric AMG could be produced in statistically significant numbers and sold at a price affordable to the merely rather wealthy than the stinkingly rich, would it actually sell?

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The answer is that if all the other electric car issues surrounding range and recharging could be sufficiently resolved, of course it would. Such a car would allow people to project an environmentally aware image while still appearing sporting, adventurous and proper petrolheads – okay, electricheads. My only problem would be that every time I passed another AMG in the street or just heard its thunder, I’d be aware that whoever was driving it was likely to be having a lot more fun than me.