Icon is perhaps best known for its many high-dollar bespoke-built vintage SUVs. Lately though, the Icon team has been cranking out a handful of other project vehicles, including cars, and each one has been more amazing than the last. We've seen a gorgeous Ford F-250, an impossibly cool Rolls-Royce, and now we have a 1949 Mercury that's hiding a silent secret. This is a Derelict build and it's powered by a Tesla Model S drivetrain.

With the Derelict line, Jonathan Ward from Icon looks to preserve the styling of a given vehicle while giving it modern underpinnings. The car in question is a 1949 Mercury, the iconic (pun intended) leadsled, and it wears perfectly faded green paint. Patina is a wonderful thing if it's the real deal. This Mercury boasts buckets of style, and that's not going to change. What will change, though, is the way this old beast runs and drives.

Icon has teamed up with a company called Stealth EV. The crew there is installing the electrified tech below the sheet metal. Sitting on an Art Morrison chassis and supported by four-wheel independent suspension are two Rinehart Motion Systems controllers, half of a Tesla Model S battery pack, and dual AM Racing electric motors. All of the power will be sent to the rear wheels via direct drive. It looks like a V-8 engine is sitting in the engine bay, but that's just the skilled work of Stealth EV.

According to Autoblog,that pair of motor controllers have been placed to look like valve covers. Below them is that Tesla battery pack. The design is brilliant and a great nod to the internal combustion bits that used to power the old Mercury.

The Icon Derelict EV Merc joins some great vehicles produced by Icon. Jonathan Ward showed off his original Derelict wagon, a combination of a 1952 DeSoto and a Chrysler Town & Country, to Jay Leno. With a modern 6.1-liter Hemi V-8 under the hood, it's a sleeper. Another more elegant sleeper is Ward's 1958 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud, which packs an LS-7 V-8. Leno got to see that one, too.

The EV Merc will be even more of a sleeper as there's no rumbling engine to give away the surprise.

If you happen to pull up next to a weathered old Mercury a stop light, you better think about your next move. You could be idling next to a silent assassin wearing old clothes.