Mercedes announces timelines for its ‘robot car’

LAS VEGAS: It's the era of connected cars and autonomous driving, and Mercedes-Benz — the German luxury carmaker — intends to roll out a 'robot car' by the year 2021. Interestingly, the company is carrying out a large amount of R&D for autonomous and connected cars at its research lab in India — its biggest development centre outside Germany.

Ola Kallenius, the global R&D head for Daimler (Mercedes' parent) and its board member, said that tech companies such as Google, Amazon, NVidia and Microsoft are increasingly playing a key role in the development of new forms of mobility as cars become more intelligent and connected.

"We are in a very strong transformational phase now. And there are four mega trends that are driving this transformation — connectivity, autonomous drive, different types of shared mobility and services, and electric drive," Kallenius told TOI at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) here.

Mercedes has been working on a variety of new technologies, and at the CES unveiled the company's 'intelligent' multimedia system, MBUX — Mercedes-Benz User Experience. Interactions with the voice-assisted system can be done by saying 'Hey Mercedes' and the set-up then develops on augmented reality, artificial intelligence and speech recognition to transform into an intelligent assistant. -GADGETS NOW