Self-driving cars are a long way from the hands of customers, but the race to get there is fierce, and no company wants to look like it’s been left behind. The biggest automakers seem especially eager to remind us constantly that they’re just as focused on the future as Silicon Valley. That’s why Mercedes-Benz shut down part of the Las Vegas Strip last night and let me take a ride in the Smart Vision EQ Concept.
The Smart Vision EQ was unveiled last fall at the Frankfurt Motor Show. After a stop in Tokyo, the Vision EQ made its US debut in Las Vegas this week. (There’s only one prototype at the moment, a Mercedes-Benz publicist told me.) The car is supposed to capture Mercedes’ — and parent company Daimler’s — take on what a fully autonomous car will look like in 2030, which explains the lack of steering wheel or pedals.
Like the name, this prototype is just a vision, which in practical terms means the thing doesn’t actually drive itself yet. My demo was piloted by a human on the side of the road who fiddled with joysticks in a bag slung around his neck. Top speed of this remote-control thrill ride was a crackling 12 miles per hour. It would likely lose a footrace.
So why did I accept the offer for a ride at CES? Sure, the car is cute and adorable and I maybe want one in my nonexistent driveway someday, but wouldn’t my fourth night of covering an exhausting CES have been better spent sleeping, instead of standing in the street at 1AM?
Mercedes-Benz went to great lengths to shut down part of Las Vegas’ main thoroughfare, and employed people to stay up through the night to give rides in an oversized RC car. I wanted to know why.
The production was a bit chaotic. Local police watched over the scene, while about two dozen folks, including Mercedes-Benz employees and impatient members of the media, meandered. Even more pedestrians stood behind them, smartphones raised in the air. Several shouted, “What the hell is that thing?” while a man up on the walkway repeatedly screamed for us all to “repent!”
But a few electric motor whirs later, the Smart Vision EQ’s translucent scissor doors slid open, and I was able to drop inside and temporarily escape the madness that is Las Vegas after midnight.
I found myself on cushioned white bench seats with plenty of room to stretch my legs. Neon blue lighting — the must-have accessory of the future — illuminated the interior. The screen that occupies almost the entire dashboard looped through some stock smartphone features, social media posts, and navigation information. Above that, the windshield stretched from the car’s nose to its tail, and gave me a panoramic view of the casino lights.
The circular doors whirred closed, and soon enough I was off. Joystick man moved me down the street with some stutters and stops. There were times where the car drifted to the side, but I wasn’t worried, because there was a big red kill switch on the floor near my boots if things got dicey.
We repeated this process a few times, which allowed my video directors enough time to capture the footage we needed. It also gave me the time to experience the feeling of being inside an actual concept car.
Here’s as much as I can tell you about what it might be like to ride in a car like this someday, considering I only went back and forth down the Vegas Strip a few times at a very low speed.
In the interior, even a car this small feels massive when you gut things like the center console, steering wheel, pedals, and most of the dashboard. Add in the see-through doors and the encompassing windshield, and there were moments where I actually felt small.
The dashboard featured things we see in a lot of futuristic infotainment demos. There were flashes of navigation UI, a Car2Go logo (which reinforced the idea that this is probably not a car Mercedes-Benz will eventually sell outright), and a few social media posts. One image showed a turtle that had 203 likes. (No, I’m not bitter that this future turtle photographer gets more likes than my posts.)
I don’t like the idea of having my social media posts and feeds displayed on the dashboard. For one thing, I rarely check Facebook, and having Twitter on the dashboard sounds like a nightmare. I’d rather use the dashboard for entertainment or navigation or maybe web browsing. There wasn’t anything to play with inside of the concept, since the screen was on a loop. Of course, who knows what our digital habits will be in 2030?
Though it didn’t matter which side I entered, I kept getting in on the left side of the car, where the driver’s seat would have been.
I understand why Mercedes would remove the pedals and steering wheel from a fully self-driving car, but the inability to drive pained me a bit more than I thought it would. All I wanted to do was take over and drive off into the desert.
Much like the way Intel capped its CES keynote with a flying taxi demo, I think Mercedes-Benz wants to be seen as a forward-thinking, cool company. You might disagree that plopping a dorky prototype car down on the Strip is the way to do that, and you might be right. This wasn’t the only technology Mercedes-Benz showed off at CES this year, but it was certainly the company’s most out-there idea, and it drew a lot of attention. And isn’t that just what CES is for?
It seems (some) people at Mercedes-Benz really do think the Smart Vision EQ is the kind of thing we’ll one day be riding in. One only has to look back to three years ago, when the company picked CES to unveil the Mercedes F015, a silver bullet of an autonomous car that was also driven down the Strip in a similar futuristic parade.
In the middle of this short, highly orchestrated, and totally hectic experience, there was a moment where I felt eerily calm. As I looked beyond the bubble that surrounded me at the blinking lights and hooting pedestrians, it felt, briefly, like I was in the middle of an autonomous ride a few years in the future. It was a ride where I didn’t have to worry about anything. I could just sit back, stare up at the night sky, and go places.
We’re still very far from the level of technology necessary to make an idea like the Smart Vision EQ come to life. Even Mercedes-Benz says the inspiration for this concept won’t be made into a production vehicle until 2030. But if and when the idea of on-demand Smart Car-sized autonomous vehicles comes to fruition, so much will likely have changed by then that this iteration of Mercedes-Benz’s take on the future will probably look either quaint or flat out wrong.
Maybe that’s the point. The Smart Vision EQ represents Mercedes-Benz’s claim on its vision for the future. It’s something to imagine, in the way the concept cars of the 1950s once did, but it’s no sweat if it’s not exactly what comes to the road. And if we all get to participate and have some fun along the way, then all the better.
Photography by Sean O’Kane / The Verge