Now, as much as we utterly love driving here at Oversteer, we will be the first to put our clammy hands up for a self-driving car.
Why? Because there are SOOOOO many times it would be awesome. Let’s face it; commuting – whether it be between towns, down the road or sitting in soul-destroying barely moving traffic for hours – is shit. That is not driving, that is simply draining your will to live on a daily basis.
So imagine when they actually do get autonomous cars sorted. Imagine how much better the commute will be then? Read the paper? Catch up on a few emails? Grab a bit more sleep?
As an unabashed fan of sleep, I know what I would choose. But there’s even more. Imagine having a bit much to drink at the pub – no worries! The car can drive itself home while you fall asleep in the back seat with that road cone you “found”.
Or you could send the car to pick up the kids from school while you continue playing Grand Theft Auto V (not the best parenting, I will admit) or even set it at a really slow speed and tie the dog to it to take it for a walk (probably would be some kind of law against that though…).
But even if none of that is allowed, letting the car handle the commute will be awesome.
That is clearly what Mercedes think, because they are well into the whole autonomous car thing. I recently had a E400 road test car and the safety systems and radar cruise control in that were remarkable. To the degree that the car was more than capable of driving itself along a heavily congested suburban road with a few minor curves, just using the radar cruise to maintain speed, stop and start and the clever lane-keeping system’s cameras to read the white lines and keep the big E-Class between them.
But with the release of the new S-Class, Mercedes have gone even further with the clever tech stuff.
To highlight this the German company has recently re-created the historic first road trip taken by Bertha Benz in her husband Karl’s invention, in order to prove to him that automobiles were the future.
Bertha Benz drove the Benz Patent-Motorwagen – widely considered to be the world’s first automobile – around 100km from Mannheim to Pforzheim in Germany 125 years ago. Since then we have come a long way – and to highlight this, Mercedes let the S-Class drive itself along the same route.
The S500 Intelligent Drive research vehicle that made the trek isn’t quite as special and space-age as you might imagine – the sensors, radar, cameras and maps services used to make it autonomous are all production-based, mainly used for active and passive safety features and adaptive cruise control in current Mercedes models.
Although, in this case, there are more of them and they’re more strategically placed around the car to supply comprehensive coverage of its surroundings to the computer brain that controls it all. It is that brain that is the special part.
Depending on how the various governments of the world legislate these kinds of things, we are not all that far away from the world of grabbing an extra snooze on the way to work. As long as they still give us control when we want it – ie: on a winding back road – then we are all for this kind of future!
Watch the video and let us know what you think
