When in China…

Pedestrian crossings on the motorway, separate speed limits for each lane, traffic signs with Chinese characters. Welcome to Shanghai. You don’t get to drive on Chinese roads unless you have a Chinese driving licence. That applies to automated and autonomous vehicles, too.

After starting the Intelligent World Drive at the Frankfurt motor show in September, Mercedes-benz decamped to China, Australia, then South Africa and will finish up in the USA. The aim, says Mercedes-benz, is to gather global insights in real-life traffic for the advancement of the technologies.

In the past seven years, MercedesBenz conducted about 5 000 test drives around the world with 175 test mules for validations of driver assistance systems in the field alone. The performance of the driver assistance systems was assessed on some 9,5 million kilometres in Europe, the USA, China, Australia and South Africa, and more than 1,2 million measurements were made especially in real-life traffic situations for their continuous advancement.

With Intelligent World Drive, Mercedes-benz is testing automated driving functions on five continents using a test vehicle based on the S-class. Over a period of five months, the saloon was due to face traffic situations of different complexities to gather valuable experiences on the road to autonomous driving.

The focus in Australia was on the validation of the latest digital map data of HERE, whereas in South Africa pedestrian detection in many new situations was due to play a major role. The final stop: CES in Las Vegas in January 2018.

Autonomous driving is one of the four strategic areas for the future which form an integral part of the corporate strategy of Daimler AG under the acronym CASE: networking (Connected), autonomous driving (Autonomous), flexible use (Shared and Services) and electric powertrains (Electric).