Mercedes-Benz鈥檚 Distronic Plus With Steering Assist

The self-driving car is a proposition too enticing for society at large to ignore. Lotus Seven enthusiast and new CEO of Google鈥檚 self-driving-car project John Krafcik sees it as the way forward, citing the need to sell on safety. Built by Roush in Livonia, Michigan, Google鈥檚 wee nugget of a thing reminds us more of college-student-proof furniture than an actual vehicle, right down to the teal plastic accents in the interior. Twenty-odd years later, this hat-shaped thing rolls up to us in the rooftop parking lot of one of Google鈥檚 Mountain View, California buildings. The coupe-length door opens via a pillar-mounted handle. The sheer size of the portal makes ingress a breeze. Once inside, we鈥檙e greeted with an expansive, slightly distorted view via a flexible, pedestrian-impact-friendly windshield. The whole thing feels a bit like a Renault Twizy re-imagined as a side-by-side. Where the steering wheel, dash, and pedals would be, there鈥檚 simply a bin with a screen mounted over it, showing an approximation of what the car sees, largely gleaned from its laser-scanning sensors.

We mashed 鈥淕O,鈥?the car responded with a brief countdown, and off we went around the parking lot, whirring like a tiny BART train鈥攁t speeds below 25 mph. As such, any estimated skidpad numbers, 0-60 figures, and other performance prognostications are rendered wholly baseless, so we won鈥檛 make them. What was interesting and frankly impressive was exactly how surefooted the system felt. Mercedes-Benz鈥檚 Distronic Plus with Steering Assist, perhaps the best self-driving system on sale today, feels positively primitive, tentative, and sketchy compared to the authority with which GumNut the Koala Car goes about its business. A man on a bicycle with a Rastafarian paint scheme shoots out from nowhere and the smartypants runabout slows its roll smoothly and surely, system unfazed by the two-wheeled miscreant. Its behavior is the result of 1.2 million miles traveled by the company鈥檚 autonomous fleet, a group of vehicles that continues to amass about 15,000 miles鈥?worth of data every week.

And while your average C/D reader may log more miles than that over the course of a year, Joe Schmuck Commuter very likely doesn鈥檛. The company points out that over the life of the program so far, it has amassed 90 years鈥?worth of driving experience. And unlike a 106-year-old driver, its servers鈥?reaction times are only getting faster. Our recent ride in Mercedes鈥檚 F015 Luxury in Motion concept left us suspicious that a nearby blacked-out Sprinter hid a pack of Swabians huddled over a console, controlling the car鈥檚 movements. If there was a cadre of Google-ites joysticking this wheeled Pikachu to and fro, we鈥檇 be surprised. We鈥檙e pretty sure little GumNut was acting pretty much on its own, save its mandate to follow a pre-planned route with defined start and stop points. Before our ride in the prototype, we went for a spin on city streets in one of Google鈥檚 Lexus RX development vehicles.

The 鈥榰tes are piloted by two-person teams, with one manning the controls and the other observing what the car 鈥渟ees鈥?on a laptop. And if the Lexus wasn鈥檛 quite as smooth as the Koalamobile, it was also faced with more demanding tasks, navigating neighborhoods, intersections, and other vehicles鈥攙ehicles driven by erratic, imperfect humans. Part of the reason Google鈥檚 machines are so good鈥攂eyond the miles logged鈥攊s that they鈥檙e running on roads the company has mapped in great detail. So is this little widget of an automatic automobile the future? Yes and no. It鈥檚 patently silly to think that self-driving vehicles aren鈥檛 the way forward. The potential societal benefits are too great. If nothing else, insurance companies hate to pay out, and autonomous vehicles have the potential to remove human fallibility from the equation. It鈥檚 a fool鈥檚 errand to believe that that Big Insurance won鈥檛 squeeze wallets and Washington to keep your hands off the tiller. Meanwhile, Google has gone on record that it doesn鈥檛 want to be in the car business; we鈥檇 expect the company to fall into the Tier I supplier realm, designing systems for automakers to install in their own vehicles. Certainly, Google鈥檚 tech makes the mildly autonomous systems on sale today seem patently rudimentary in function. But we do have one request: Whatever the brave (or pusillanimous) autonomous future holds for us, might we spec it with less teal Tupperware, please?