Mercedes-Benz and Michael Schumacher today announced a new long-term partnership focusing on the development of the brand’s safety and comfort systems, united under the name “Intelligent Drive.”
The seven-times Formula 1 world champion, known for his previous work on road safety, will help develop those systems and represent them as an ambassador, supporting Mercedes-Benz’s involvement in this field. The carmaker says it will use Schumacher’s expertise to develop the best solutions for safety on the roads.
Schumacher, who retired last year from Formula 1, says he is an advocate of driving assistance systems, and has been so even during his F1 career:
“During my Formula 1 time I always believed that you must not allow yourself to rest on your laurels, but that you must continuously try to improve. In so doing I was very often able to rely on the help of all the technologies available to me in the car and use them to my advantage,” he said. “That is why I am a declared supporter of driving assistance systems both in the racing car and in the road-going car”, he added.
Schumacher will make his first appearance as a partner of Mercedes-Benz together with the company’s CEO Dieter Zetsche on May 1, 2013, at the “Handelsblatt PATHFINDER – The future starts today” event. Sounds like a quite boring thing to do after driving racecars pretty much all your life, but we guess somebody has to do it and we imagine the paychecks more than compensate for the endless conferences Schumi will have to attend from now on…
By Dan Mihalascu
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