I’m Bernhard Weidemann, I’m in press communications at Mercedes-Benz,
specifically for self-driving cars/autonomous driving. I'm 37 years old, with
Daimler not too long – I just joined three years ago.
Well, the Intelligent World Drive is kind of a funny idea at first – like why
would you go to so many different countries? If you think of the
car as a student on student exchange that is making some learning experiences,
gathering some data, looking at how do people drive in China, how do they drive
in Australia, in South Africa, in the United States – and with that learning experience
coming back home at the end of the day and get that input into the
development phase of our new and upcoming driver assistant systems – so we
can get the best system out on the market.
Self-driving cars are really fascinating, I think, because they give you the time of your
life – not like in “Dirty Dancing”, obviously, but they give me time to do
something else and they’re changing society in a tremendous way. And
that’s why I think a lot of people have a high opinion of it and can’t wait for
the self-driving cars to actually be here.
Well, we wouldn’t be Mercedes-Benz if we rested with the level of driver
assistance we’ve achieved today, but we’re gonna take it one step further.
That includes level three automation – which means the driver will be able to
actually take the hands off the steering wheel. And at the same time we are
working on level 4 and 5 automation – which means the car
actually doesn’t need a driver at all anymore.
I’m extremely excited. After a long time of preparation we’re finally getting our wheel off the ground and
getting off with our journey. Jochen and Matthias, two of my colleagues,
will be on the way with me…
I’m Jochen Haab, I’m Manager of Concept and Field Validation of Driver Assistant Systems at RD of
Mercedes-Benz Cars. In China, next stop, we’re going to go to Shanghai – so we have
one typical mega city. That’s our main focus. To see mega
city traffic, congested traffic, many different types of participants of
traffic. Not only vehicles.
I’m Matthias Kaiser and I work at Mercedes-Benz for the development of advanced driver assistant systems.
For me it’s a very sophisticated task. What will happen? How do the systems perform
in the different countries? And for me as an engineer, well, it’s a kind of an honour
to go on that world trip and see how our S-Class with the modified software will
perform.
