IAA review
We've ignored the luxury SUVs and looked instead at the city car concepts, lightweight materials and powertrain technologies that will cut fleet-average emissions.
- Published in Features.
Balasubramanian: "Keyless entry and power-close are no longer enough"
Daimler
The Mercedes F 125 is a technology carrier that hints at how the S-Class of 2025 might be engineered. You could describe it as lightweight, zero-emission luxury sedan with seamless and permanent connectivity to the internet.
The body structure is a mix of carbon composites, plastics, aluminium and high-strength steel weighing 250kg. Powering this are four hub motors fed by a fuel-cell stack and lithium-sulphur battery. Some 7.5kg of hydrogen is stored at only 30bar instead of 700bar a pair of loadbearing rectangular tanks integrated into the floorpan.
It’s enough for 50km of battery-only range and 1,000km in total, and Daimler has made sure that driver and passengers are as relaxed and as well-informed on world affairs as possible – comfort and infotainment features have been taken up a level.
It starts with the laminated carbon-composite doors. Keyless entry and power-close are no longer enough; who wants to lift a handle any more? Now, you don’t have to.
“You open the doors with an upward gesture of your arm,” says Professor Bharat Balasubramanian, Daimler’s vice-president of product innovation. “To close it you move your arm or your hand down, and to stop the door in any position you make another gesture.”
The firm is developing gesture recognition for a number of applications: the 17-inch screen at the front is controlled by hand gestures given by the person reclining in the rear lounge seat. They can switch it on, scroll through menus and make selections, just by waving.
“We’re also developing a touchpad which not only recognises when you touch it but when you keep your fingers just above it,” says Balasubramanian.
“When you’re driving down rough roads you can’t keep your fingers on them – it’s just taking the technology one step further.”
This applies to the speech recognition system too. Current systems have everything integrated into the head unit; this one is enhanced with cloud computing.
Download Facebook, for example, and the commands and speech recognition for them are downloaded too – it’s context-specific. You don’t need massive data libraries in the vehicle, and because it comes from the cloud you always get the latest versions. “It’s a very powerful instrument and allows you to interact in complete sentences,” says Balasubramanian.
3D instrument panel and gesture-controlled infotainment could appear in the next S-Class
