CES 2018: Mercedes is outsmarting autonomous car cheats

Mercedes-Benz field validation engineer Jochen Haab has just concluded a world tour in one of the company’s datalogging semi-autonomous demo vehicles, a Mercedes-Benz S-Class that has covered five continents and more than 10,000km.

His team’s five-month project wrapped up in Las Vegas, conveniently timed for the company’s appearance at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show.

Along the journey the team has gathered approximately one terabyte of raw data at a rate of 12GB every minute.

Navigating hook turns, kangaroos, America’s Botts Dots (raised line markings), car pool lanes and pedestrians, the validation team will now use the data in the continual improvement of its self-driving technology.

Jochen is an infectious character who is enthusiastic about the area of autonomous driving but he is also measured, welcoming government regulation and guidance as car companies navigate this crucial safety conundrum, particularly as they seek to mitigate for unexpected driver behaviour.

“It is very important to have a framework, because if not you are in a grey zone, and you have to somehow speculate and find out what is safe,” said Haab.

“We think we know well what would be safe and in what conditions and what we can allow the driver to do and what not to do. What we want to make sure … is that he cannot misuse the system, where he’s misusing it.”

Haab is making specific reference to a case in 2014, when a Mercedes-Benz owner uploaded a video to the internet that showed how he had managed to fool the car’s active steering assist system into believing he had his hand on the wheel by taping a soda can to his steering wheel.

The result was a car that continued to drive itself without alerting the driver to place his hands back onto the wheel. It was a scenario that Mercedes-Benz engineers had not foreseen but one that was so significant that it resulted in regulation changes to active steering systems.

Since that event, Mercedes has re-engineered its steering system for new vehicles so that drivers cannot trick it. That included a major hardware change to S-class to address the new regulation which impacted the torque interface for the steering.

“If something had happened when that guy was on the back seat, then that would have been a clear case of misuse. Even though nowhere in the manual does it say ‘do not tape half-filled cans to the steering wheel’.

“That’s a clear misuse case and that’s not even foreseeable misuse.”

It’s that unpredictability of drivers that sees Mercedes-Benz continue to exercise caution in the development of its technologies, a position which has seen it and other traditional car manufacturers criticised for a perceived dragging of feet.

However, Haab is not concerned by the criticism, and refuses to get drawn on obvious comparisons to the tech-world’s golden child and industry usurper, Tesla.

The Silicon Valley is heralded as an innovator for its own approach to development, effectively using its owners as beta testers by issuing over-the-air software updates that require drivers to help their cars relearn their safety systems as they drive.

In contrast, Mercedes retains a team of field validation engineers who are responsible for continual improvement programs like the S-Class tour, and has no immediate plans for making over-the-air updates a reality on its own driving assistance systems.

“At Mercedes we feel very strongly about not only developing very good algorithms but also checking them before we put them to the market in a field validation environment,” said Haab.

“So we put a very high effort and a very high timeline into validating our systems once they have been developed and then improving them in a circular development process in incremental steps until we finally launch them into the market.

“That helps us of course to stay tuned and to stay close to the customer, and that means that customers actually do experience what they expect, and to make that safe from the very first kilometre that they’re driving.”

Call it German over-engineering or simple pragmatism, but Mercedes-Benz won’t be hurried on its own development timelines as a reaction to what Tesla does, yet nor is it seeking to restrict driving enjoyment by implementing overly cautious safeguards.

“There’s always a limit. We cannot punish everyone who is driving reasonably just to make sure that nobody puts a woodpecker model on here,” said Haab, pointing to his steering wheel and sounding a lot like a man who has done his best to predict the myriad ways in which owners might choose to mess with his systems.