Intelligent Park Pilot: Mercedes Makes it Clear Why Germany Lost in Automotive
What could be sadder than a joyful announcement from a German manufacturer boasting about a technology that no one needs and works almost nowhere?
Mercedes has once again taken the cake. Three years ago, the Stuttgart-based company already introduced the Intelligent Park Pilot, and I ripped it apart even then. What does it do? You can use it to drive up to a garage at the airport and then send the Mercedes off to park on its own after you get out.
Mercedes board member Markus Schäfer proudly announced this on LinkedIn. What was then only available to the S-Class as a paid additional function is now – drum roll! – is now also available for the EQS and EQE electric vehicles. For a surcharge!
With this highly automated and driverless parking function (SAE Level 4), you send your car off from an exit point in a garage, and the car then drives itself to the pre-booked parking space. The garage itself must be equipped with expensive sensors so that it can steer the vehicle to the parking space.
To translate that, you can currently only do that in a single garage at Stuttgart Airport, which cost money to rebuild. Then you can’t get out at the terminal and park the car in the garage or even drive home. No, you have to drive the car into the garage, find the staging area there, book a parking space in advance, because you can’t just pick any free parking space, and then you have to get from the garage to the terminal. When picking up the car, you have to go from the terminal to the garage, and then first pay the parking fee, and then wait again in the staging area until the car is with me.
In other words, the Intelligent Park Pilot is function that can’t do anything and no one needs.
While in San Francisco Waymo and Cruise Level 4 means that they are allowed to operate robot cabs 24 hours a day and 7 days a week without a driver all over the city and starting a few days ago they are also allowed to charge a fare, Mercedes boasts about automated parking that can only be done in one(!) garage worldwide. Aren’t the Mercedes people embarrassed?
KREATIVE INTELLIGENZ
You’ve read a lot about ChatGPT lately: the artificial intelligence that can write entire books and is already rumored to put legions of authors, copywriters and translators out of work. And ChatGPT is not alone, the AI family is constantly growing. For example, DALL-E paints pictures, Face Generator simulates faces, and MusicLM composes music. What are we witnessing? The end of civilization or the beginning of something completely new? Futurologist Dr. Mario Herger classifies the latest developments from Silicon Valley and shows what changes, some of them groundbreaking, are just around the corner.
At the same time, we recognize the problem of the SAE levels for autonomous driving. What Mercedes describes as level 4 in comparison to Waymo and Cruise is on the one hand Tipp-Kick (Mercedes) and on the other hand Champions League (Waymo and Cruise). We should finally bury the SAE levels, because the example of Mercedes shows the absurdity.
The fact that the Mercedes board also boasts about the Intelligent Park Pilot is a sign that we in Germany have completely given up. This is not how German carmakers are leading technology innovation. They already lost the race. An embarrassment beyond compare.
This article was also published in German.
