Following up on their American adventures, Mercedes successfully tested its semi-autonomous Highway Pilot system on the German Autobahn. This technology can be fitted into regular production trucks and is a huge step towards fully autonomous transportation.
The Federal State of Baden-Württemberg set Daimler Trucks loose on its highways, showing the world that the technology is pretty much production ready despite the missing legal context surrounding autonomous vehicles.
At this stage, the driver remains in control despite the truck accelerating, braking and steering on its own, but Daimler says humans can never drive as efficiently as the robot does, and since the aim is to minimize fuel consumption while improving traffic flow, driverless transportation is what we’re looking at in the long run.
But since the legal environment is not ready for such a huge step forward, the Highway Pilot system is only here now to make the drivers forget about the challenges of monotonous roads and long drives in heavy traffic.
The machines are coming!
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