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Michael Taylor18 Nov 2014
NEWS

Benz goes autonomous

Four swivelling lounge chairs and an extendable steering wheel for 'manual driving' inside Merc's vision of the driverless car

The world’s oldest car-maker is getting serious about taking on the world’s youngest car-maker to build the best high-tech car nobody will ever drive.

Stung by Google’s promise to make its autonomous car technology public by 2017, Mercedes-Benz this week showed a high-tech take on the interior of a luxury autonomous car of the not-too-distant future.

The virtual interior is said by Mercedes-Benz insiders to give a teaser view of an all-new luxury concept car the premium German company will unveil during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January next year.

Mercedes-Benz already has an autonomous S-Class, the S 500 Intelligent Drive, and the autonomous Future Truck 2025, based on the Actros 1845, and is one of only two car companies to hold California state autonomous car permits.

Yet its Interior of the Future, shown at this week’s Autonomous Mobility workshop in California, pushes beyond the logarithms of autonomous technology and explores the opportunities self-driving cars might bring to cabin designers and engineers.

Combining input from futurologists, designers, engineers, materials specialists and computer boffins, the Interior of the Future plays on what freedoms autonomous driving could bring.

“With this concept we are defining the luxury of the future,” Daimler AG Head of Design, Gorden Wagener, claimed.

“We have evolved an interdisciplinary scenario and thought through the freedoms that autonomous driving brings: more space, more time, more ways to interact.”

The key feature of the cabin is that it is fitted with four comfort-oriented “lounge” chairs that can pivot to allow all passengers to face each other. The front seats can then swing back around to face the extendable steering wheel for what, in the future, will be called “manual driving”.

“We are convinced that autonomous driving will be a central factor on the way to comfortable, accident-free driving,” Daimler’s Head of Corporate Research and Sustainability and Chief Environmental Officer, Professor Doctor Herbert Kohler, said.

“Autonomous driving relieves pressure and stress in driving situations usually regarded as tedious, for example in tailbacks, in inner-city areas or on long journeys.

But, he insisted, it was vital that autonomous cars didn’t get caught up solely in the technology that makes them autonomous.

“At the same time, autonomous driving opens up new ways in which people can make the best use of their time on the road.

“The time spent in the car acquires a totally new quality. This is in keeping with the growing desire for privacy and individuality in a crowded and hectic urban environment.”

Mercedes suggests one of the major innovations in the interior was to create a “digital living space” where those inside can interact with the car via gestures or touches and even by the detection of eye movements.

It brings the outside world into the car at will via all-round information screens and displays.

“Visions are necessary to drive the social discourse on mobility and the design of the urban environment ahead,” Prof Dr Kohler said.

“With our innovative interior concept of a luxury lounge for an autonomous vehicle of the future, we are giving a specific outlook on our ideas of future mobility.

“This interior concept forms an essential part of a new overall vehicle concept which we will be unveiling at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (in January).”

Benz has already staged some autonomous coups, including having its S 500 Intelligent Drive car autonomously recreate the original Bertha Benz drive for 100km from Mannheim to Pforzheim in 2013.

But Mercedes hasn’t had it all its own way, with Audi becoming the first car company to apply for an autonomous license from California and Nevada. Each of the German brands has two permits from California, while Google snared 25.

Autonomous driving is legal in four US states (starting with Nevada in 2011 and then adding Florida, California and Michigan, plus the District of Colombia), thanks largely to intensive lobbying from the tech giant, Google.

It began its work in modified Toyota Prius models and added other cars with two of its autonomous fleet involved in crashes already (one was hit from behind by another car in 2010 while the other crashed near Google headquarters while being “manually” driven).

It shocked the car industry by launching its own driverless car, sans pedals and steering wheel, in May this year. However, Google isn’t planning on going into the car business. Instead it wants to commercialise its Google Chauffeur software.

That hasn’t stopped Daimler from ramping up the pressure on its own autonomous-vehicle engineers.

“Autonomous driving is not some future utopia, but is already technically possible even in complex urban traffic or on inter-urban routes,” Prof Dr Kohler said.

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Written byMichael Taylor
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