Mercedes-Benz: No timeline for Level 3 automated driving in Australia

Mercedes-Benz has prioritised Europe, the United States and China for the rollout of its latest-generation Level 3 automated driving system, which allows the driver to take their hands off the wheel and focus on ‘secondary activities’ like browsing the internet or watching a movie.

Australia? The head of concept and field evaluation of driver assistance systems for Mercedes-Benz worldwide, Jochen Haab, has told carsales that the sheer size of Australia’s major road networks and finite resources at the Stuttgart-based car-maker mean there’s currently no timeframe for the introduction of its Level 3 ‘Drive Pilot’ system Down Under.

That’s not saying ‘never’, but Haab could not nominate a timeline when there’s clearly so many hurdles yet to clear, including thorough field evaluation, regulatory approval and, not least of all, a willingness from Aussie customers to embrace the technology.

And unlike Tesla, which controversially allows private owners to test ‘Beta’ versions of its Autopilot systems (typically the last stage before the software is fully released to the market), Mercedes-Benz will not hand over responsibility for testing its autonomous safety systems so easily.

“Level 3? We will see…” Haab told us at an Intelligent Drive Insight event in Melbourne recently.

“There’s a lot of data collection to be done in this country. At Mercedes we say that we want to have seen each and every kilometre on every lane of each highway that we clear – and your country is not that small!

“It’s doable, but to be realistic, we only have a certain number of developers and test people.

“Europe is priority one, for obvious reasons, and then we have China and the USA almost equal, for market reasons, and then we look at other countries – Australia not being the smallest one, of course.

“We have to look at the rollout plan. It’s a matter of production, of market need, of certification, to get it to other countries. But, yes, we will have a set-up for right-hand-driven cars because we have a very strong British market, and that’s sort of the door-opener for Australia as well.”

Billed as the world’s first internationally certified conditional automated driving system (SAE Level 3), Drive Pilot has been up and running in Germany since 2022, while Beijing and the US states of California and Nevada came on board late last year.

The system allows drivers of cars such as the Mercedes-Benz S-Class and EQS to take their hands off the wheel, their mind off the traffic, and simply relax on designated highways, letting the car do the driving tasks via a complex array of radars, Lidar, ultrasonic sensors, cameras and high-precision GPS.

Compared to the fully autonomous Level 4/5, the Level 3 Drive Pilot operates on a ‘conditional’ basis, meaning the driver must be alert enough to take back control (within 10 seconds) when requested by the car.

Haab and his team are currently validating Drive Pilot for higher capabilities, too. Germany will soon move from 60km/h to 95km/h when following a vehicle on a highway, with speeds up to 130km/h enabled by 2030.

“The ultimate goal would be to drive 130km/h without a lead vehicle, at all times of day, in tunnels and through construction zones, for example,” explained Haab. Operating on icy roads, in freezing temperatures, is also being tested (the current threshold is four degrees Celsius).

“Those are our restrictions today and we want to get rid of these restrictions and have more and more scenarios where the car can actually do its Level 3 tasks.

“Of course, then the next step is to get it off the highway … [and] into urban roads where you are driving slow, then rural roads – that’s the hardest part because at high speeds you can encounter anything, from animals crossing to tractors, and you have high differential speeds which you don’t have in the city.”

Haab said over-the-air (OTA) software updates would unlock many of these advanced capabilities, particularly when its cars migrated to the company’s sixth-generation electrical architecture due to make its way into production models next year, including the MMA-underpinned next-generation Mercedes-Benz CLA.

But there’s clearly a long road ahead before Australian drivers can simply hit a button and take their hands off the steering wheel, turning to that text message on the mobile phone they just missed.

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