Riding through the streets of San Francisco in a driverless car

Self-driving cars won't just change the way we go to and fro, according to the world's oldest car company. Instead, Mercedes-Benz thinks self-driving cars will change everything about the way they design cars and the way everybody else lives with them.

That’s why Benz built the F015 Luxury In Motion concept car, which has been set up as their first genuine effort to blaze a trail for generations of its designers to follow.

It might look like a giant, metallic computer mouse, but the F015 Luxury In Motion could do to the chauffeur what the car itself did to the blacksmith, because the driver won’t have to be the driver all the time. Or even for part of the time.

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The Mercedes-Benz F 015 Luxury in Motion in in San Francisco. “In the future,” Dr Mankowski says, “speed won’t matter anymore. Only time and space.”

It is, effectively, Mercedes-Benz’s vision of what the S-Class of 2030 might look and drive like and it’s just about the most radical overhaul of conventional thinking in the history of Mercedes-Benz concepts. And when your history dates back more than 110 years, that’s a big call and a massive departure.

A major part of its forward thinking is in its interior, where it brings forward the idea of a car that not only prioritises giving leisure time back to the driver but is in constant contact with everything around it, including other cars, bike riders and pedestrians.

But one of its real keys is that it makes enormous efforts to communicate with the outside world, including letting pedestrians know they’ve been seen and, when it’s safe, even using the laser lights in its grille to paint a pedestrian crossing in front of the car for them.

It's a car that's been designed with input from both Daimler's Sindelfingen head office and its future tech wizards at its Sunnyvale, California, future research lab. It gives you a good idea of what this car means to Mercedes-Benz that the person most heavily consulted before and during its development was its in-house futurologist, Dr Alexander Mankowski, rather than an engineering boffin.

"Anyone who focuses solely on the technology has not yet grasped how autonomous driving will change our society," Daimler boss, Dieter Zetsche said.

“The car is growing beyond its role as a mere means of transport and will ultimately become a mobile living space.”

The first thing you notice about the F015 is its size. Benz wanted to maximize its interior space so that it would truly qualify as an S-Class successor about three or four generations hence, so it sits on a 3,610mm wheelbase. If that doesn’t mean much to you, its wheelbase is nearly half a metre longer than the S-Class Maybach.

It’s probably a good thing that it parks itself, then.

The layout has been enabled by its predicted use of fuel-cell power, which allows Benz to be flexible about where it puts the drive and power pieces – pieces which, in 20 years, it predicts will be a lot less relevant than they are today.

Dr Mankowski’s theories and research insists that the biggest luxuries anybody will be able to have in 20 years will be space and time, particularly as cities become more and more crowded.

And that time and space will be readily available at the top end of the autonomous-car market, if the F015 is any indication.

Interior space

The monobox design is all about maximising interior space and turning the cabin into a lounge, complete with full, wrap-around touch screens and front seats that can be turned around to complete the “lounge” experience.

The first shock on entering the cabin is that there are none of the car industry’s traditional fixed points that people have to design around. There is no transmission tunnel, for example, and no door sills. The floor is so flat it seems like a furniture store’s display area, trimmed in wood by the design gurus at Benz’s semi-secret interiors’ studio on Lake Como, and everything flows into everything else with no obvious joins.

There is no B-pillar, so there is an enormous entry and exit space. There are things that don’t make it exceptionally easy or dignified to get in and out of, though; mainly the roof and seat hip points being quite low and the enormous armrest wings on the four seats.

The steering wheel is small and folds away when the car's doing all the work itself and the dash indicates that, by 2040 or so, Mercedes will do away with its current afterthought-looking stick-on multimedia screen. The steering wheel is important because, Mercedes insists, it will always allow the driver to be in control when he or she wants to be, unlike Google.

And, critically, the front seats swivel around to face the rear, which gets easier to do as you trust the car more and you can renew the lost art of conversation.

“If you give people the opportunity they will socialise and not use their digital devices,” Dr Mankowski claimed. “The social-media factor goes down when people can socialise. They turn social media into a public utility. Electronic social media is not social, but we have to have it and that’s where social media will go if we have actual socialising.

“This car is all about interaction. You can have interaction with your children and can turn around to observe them, talk to them. This idea of interaction changed the whole architecture of the car.”

Lehman says everything on the screens is controlled by either eye-tracking, gestures or touches and claims the interior has fewer actual buttons than a smart phone, which is true, but only if you don’t count the seat buttons.

The front screen on the dash has an eye tracker and, Benz says, if you look at something, it figures out what you’re looking at and you only have to make the gesture to adjust it. If you look at the climate control, then make an “up” gesture, the temperature will rise, and the same goes for the audio systems.

The screens are filled with curious, moving blue circles, some of which are a touch faded and others a richer blue. And they’re changing and moving all the time.

Hutzenlaub explains that’s because future engineering will connect all cars and every blue circle represents another car and the closer it is, the bluer and bigger it gets. It’s a technology unaffected by buildings or tunnels, too, and Benz says it will be a major safety breakthrough.

“The blue particles are like a three-dimensional world and represent other cars on the road around you. When they are all linked, it will make more sense,” Hutzenlaub said.

“They won’t just be cars, but, eventually points of interest and friends and restaurants and things like that. There’s another reason behind the blue dots, though. It stops people getting carsick.

“It reduces motion sickness. If the images on the screens are still and the car moves it’s upsetting to many people, especially if they’re facing backwards.

“But if something moves on the screen, it’s a lot easier. We did a lot of research for motion sickness to see how people reacted to non-moving content. They had some issues. Maybe 10 per cent had difficulties until we made the images move.”

But there’s more to the screens than letting people know how close other cars are. They are also the platforms that can be used to watch live, streamed movies or sports events, they will show photos from your own files or social media, constantly moving them around the car. They can play live television, with a 360 degree view of whatever’s showing, or they can simply show what’s being beamed in to the car’s own cameras.

“Sometimes I would like to show the road I am driving on,” Lehman said. “You can also plug in from home or the office to see what the car’s camera is looking at via your phone or computer. To make sure it’s clear and not stolen or not being put in a dangerous situation.”

That’s because in a Mercedes-Benz future, the car will drop you off at work and then park itself somewhere on the outskirts of town.

“The first victim of the competition for public space will be public parking,” Dr Mankowski said. “People are always on the move and are looking for places to relax. Density means stress and we are headed for a reinvention of shared-space ideas.”

There is so much energy being drawn by all of those screens and all of that data flowing around the F015 Future In Motion concept that Lehman admits it takes an enormous amount of energy to run it all.

Camera sensors

“Fifty per cent of all the power from the motors is needed for the graphics and autonomous brainpower, etc,” he said.

“But it’s a first and in the future it will be much less than this in production.”

On top of the multimedia stuff, there are proximity sensors and camera sensors and ultrasonic sensors and touch sensors and radar and optical sensors and thermal imaging sensors, plus the antenna.

That contributes to the astonishing noise level in the car, with its cooling fans – which just cool the brains for the multimedia devices – pumping up the interior noise levels beyond 76dBa at 30km/h, which is about what you could expect from a normal car at around 140km/h.

On our “drives” in the car, we started with Lehman driving, then switching to autonomous and turning around to face the back. Then I had a “drive” after he’d told it where to go I accelerated it to its limit of 45km/h by swiping a digital throttle on the door screen, then slowed it back down again.

And then I ignored it, turned around and it stayed true to its course, finally parking itself neatly back in its makeshift garage.

But there's the catch. While the ideas are there for autonomous driving, the actual F015 Future In Motion prototype isn't autonomous. Instead, we are driven around a convoluted, complex airstrip road configuration via a highly accurate GPS system, not unlike the Track Trainer BMW showed a decade ago.

Err, why?

Well, Hutzenlaub said, this car is actually about what you could do in production with the opportunities autonomous driving opens up for you, rather than actually being an autonomous car.

Besides, he argues, Mercedes-Benz sent a near-production S500 Intelligent Drive prototype autonomously down the same 100km trip from Mannheim to Pforzheim in Germany that Bertha Benz took in 1888. Proving the autonomous technology is not the point of the car, while taking advantage of autonomous opportunities was precisely the point. Plenty of those opportunities, they insist, are for those outside the car, not inside it.

“Today you tell your children not to cross the road without looking left and right,” Dr Mankowski said. “Tomorrow you would say ‘is there a blue light and has the car indicated it has seen you? If not, stay away from an autonomous car.’

“With a robot driving a car with no indication of what it’s doing, humans don’t know what it’s doing and that is very difficult. It’s important for us that we know that the car tells you it has seen you. The car will show its intentions.”

The first key to this is a set of laser lights at the front. If the car considers it safe, it will paint a laser-lit green pedestrian crossing in front of it to let you know you’re good to go, whether you’re on foot or on a bicycle. All the while, the blue lights in its grille will swipe across to indicate for you to go and an external speaker will tell you it’s safe to go, while the rear end tells everyone else to stop because there’s a pedestrian in front.

It’s all designed for a world that’s not yet here, but Benz hopes to put some of its underbody lessons into production before Dr Mankowski’s vision of the future arrives.

Its combination of carbon fibre and high strength steels cuts around 40 per cent from the weight of an equivalent aluminium structure today, and it’s stronger. There’s a 219kW electric motor and another one with 213kW, both driven from electricity from, in the main, fuel cells.

It’s capable of a range of more than 1,000km via a combination of more than 150km from a lithium-ion battery pack and the rest out of the fuel cell that charges it, and it uses inductive charging, rather than a cable.

Benz quotes 6.7 seconds for the sprint to 100km/h and it has a 200km/h top speed, though I’ve buried these numbers way down here because that’s how relevant they are.

In the future, Dr Mankowski says, speed won’t matter anymore. Only time and space.