Mercedes-Benz claims that truly fully-autonomous vehicles are at least 10 years from becoming a reality.
While recently speaking at the Australian Grand Prix, the head of validation and testing at Mercedes-Benz Cars R&D Jochen Haab revealed that the carmaker’s currently self-driving systems sit between level 2 and level 3 and that we are still a long time away from level 5.
“To have that level of automation where you sit into the car at point X and tell it to go to point Y and maybe even pre-program it, and then you get in the car and – lets imagine it as a driverless taxi – and tell the car to take me to Melbourne airport, do your emails and then the car says ok get ready to get out… to do that in that level of high automation, I think it’s at least a decade away,” Haab told Car Advice.
According to Haab, the automaker isn’t rushing into the development and deployment of autonomous driving technologies quite like Tesla which has already outfitted its vehicles with the hardware needed for level 5 autonomous driving.
“It’s a good idea to design systems on the basis of statistics, but it’s a bad idea to design them to statistics alone. Our brand slogan is best or nothing, I would not like it to be all-or-nothing on autonomous, and just believe that it would work.”
It is reported that the facelifted Mercedes-Benz S-Class due in April will debut the most advanced autonomous system on the market. Mercedes says it will include a new feature that will allow it to read upcoming corners with sensors and on-board map data and will automatically determine if it is entering the corner at the correct speed.
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