Hands-free car decades away - Benz

A Mercedes-Benz safety expert has declared the hands-free self-driving car is still decades away, despite next year’s new S-Class limousine having a limited amount of autonomous capability.

As reported last week, the W222 S-Class will have the ability to automatically follow the vehicle in front in slow moving traffic.

However, the feature, dubbed Distronic Plus with Steering Assist, switches off if the driver’s hands are removed from the steering wheel for more than 10 seconds, or the speed rises above 10km/h.

Jochen Haab, the manager of Mercedes-Benz’s active safety testing program, told motoring.com.au on in exclusive interview the W222’s autonomous ability was in human terms equivalent to a three-year-old child.

“It used to be a baby and you had to carry it around as the driver,” Mr Haab explained. “The next is the three-year-old walking around the house, meaning in real life it can swim in congested traffic autonomously.

“And then driving autonomously in certain situations in certain routes, on certain highways for certain lengths at a certain speed - that will then be the teenager.

“And then at some point in time you experience the grown-up, but that is years, even decades, away. By that I mean push the button in the navigation and then the car … leaves your driveway, takes you from Melbourne to Sydney and then parks at the Sydney Opera House in the parking lot. I think that is still decades down the road.”

Mr Haab explained government regulation provided a practical legal road block to the introduction of autonomous cars in many places, although the driver-less car has been approved in California.

But more practically, the autonomous technology is simply not developed to the level required to guarantee the safety of road users in and around a self-driven vehicle.

“What we do know at the current moment is we can drive the car autonomously,” Mr Haab said. “You know the car steers for you, but allowing the driver to text message or read his newspaper … you have to predict the next number of seconds. We haven’t set the threshold yet, but it will be between five and 15 seconds.

“You have to predict for sure that you can still drive autonomously in 10 seconds, for example, otherwise you have to sound an alarm and give the driver time to put away his newspaper and grab the steering wheel without getting a heart attack.

“That is the big technical threshold - you will probably need the first steps into car-to-car and car-to-infrastructure information for that. You will have to have much enhanced GPS or Galileo (European Union sat-nav) systems.”

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