German luxury car manufacturer Mercedes-Benz has been a frontrunner not just in terms of launching new products in India and globally but also in the adoption of new technologies which are impacting human mobility. The German OEM has also established one of its largest research hubs in Bengaluru, India – Mercedes-Benz Research & Development India (MBRDI).
According to Manu Saale, MD & CEO, MBRDI, the facility contributes and value-adds to all facets of vehicle development. In an exclusive interaction with Express Mobility, he shares a sneak peek at how the future of mobility will look impacted by electric, connected, and autonomous vehicles.
Edited Excerpts.
What is MRDI’s role in helping Mercedes-Benz to go all-electric by 2030 and shaping the future of luxury mobility?
Mercedes Research & Development India and its engineers are contributing virtually to every facet of vehicle development, especially in the areas of electric mobility.
MRDI has been contributing a lot of research in areas such as connected mobility. There are a lot of engineers that are contributing toward autonomous tech, which is the next most exciting trend in the auto industry.
We are also working on digital transformation that’s going on in the industry within the areas of product development. Our teams in Bengaluru and Pune are contributing virtually end-to-end in various ways to the entire facet of vehicle development.
Can you give some insights on the development of the electric mobility front and autonomous technology?
We’ll talk about electric mobility and then come to this EQXX, which is a showpiece demonstrating to the world how much we can push the limits of technology and what we can achieve out of that.
I think climate change is in front of us, we have all been discussing that at various forums, and governments and regulators are talking about it actively.
And certainly, auto companies like ours, are keen to contribute to making a difference, especially in the global discussions around climate change in general.
We started these discussions long ago with our first offerings coming out of the world of internal combustion engines, offering hybrids and electric. And to keep it very simple, as a car company, we have been discussing having an equivalent electric model to an internal combustion variant that we offered at the beginning.
Soon, we came in and said, we’ll do electric models first and the industry followed up. And very recently, very boldly as well, we went and said all-electric product portfolio. And that tells you a lot about the commitment from Mercedes-Benz, toward sustainable carbon neutral mobility in all forms. In markets that really allow and support electric mobility, which is quite a significant part of the world.
In the next two years, you will see electric-only versions of Mercedes that are being launched. And in offering customers a choice to go in for clean mobility in many ways. Electric, of course, is making the most telling impact right now, the automated driving is still at the L2 and L3 level, we are one of the first OEMs that really got permission to do that on public roads recently. It’s even on offer for buying, a customer can buy an L2 class system in Germany, it’s called Drive Pilot. I had the pleasure of driving it in Stuttgart myself the first time, you know, I did more than 100km in an LTE + car. It is very exciting to sit in a car like that. There’s a lot of dependence on technology and infrastructure when it comes to automated driving markets or just getting prepared for it.
Electricity, let’s say, is the forerunner when it comes to disruptions, if we get a little bit on the charging infrastructure around markets and countries, the whole connected solutions around it that people need – roaming, digital payments, charging, and how you pay for it among others.
I really think that electric mobility is here to stay. And it’s going to make a huge difference to the volumes that we sell around the world, especially to discerning customers who are willing to go that mile. Last but not the least, there has been a commitment toward carbon-neutral mobility by 2030. Mercedes says, not only from the fleet that we sell but also from the manufacturing processes that go behind it from the materials that are chosen in designing the cars, it’s going to be an end-to-end sustainability discussion within the company.
What about the Vision EQX?
Our new strategy statement actually has sustainability as the guiding principle. The first steps towards this are already taken, with the EQC, the EQs, that were launched, and the EQs SUV that’s going to debut soon also, around the world are all examples of going electric only with our portfolio.
If we talk about Vision EQXX, it was born as a concept. The press went completely ballistic with the achievements of the engineering feat that EQXX pulled off. We did Stuttgart to the South of France, a good 1,000km with a single charge. And when we arrived at our destination, we still had some juice left in the battery, about 140km of juice still left in the battery. Absolutely normal conditions. I have been part of the team and have seen the videos.
We’re also happy because the Bangalore engineers contributed as well, in the form of simulations and techniques to EQXX. I’m hoping that we can bring this car and showcase it in India at some point in time soon. But right now, it’s making news all over. And there’s a lot of things that we’ve learned that can come into production cars eventually out of this.
What is your view on the role of next-generation digital technologies and how is it driving the automotive industry?
Well, there are two ways we’re looking at cameras and vision if that’s what you meant. One of them is, of course, to perceive the outside world. And you know, if you have to replace the driver and come up with a completely one-to-one replacement of kind of a free driving scenario with automated driving. It would depend heavily not just on the radars and the LiDARs that are nearly part of the standard paraphernalia meanwhile, for automated driving, but also on a very good camera that is kind of sensing the world for you replacing, let’s say the driver’s eye.
You may even partly allow the software behind to take over the logic as well. There’s a telling role, there’s a definitive role that the camera is going to play, looking at the environment, sensing what it’s saying, not only for deciding how automated driving should work but also probably kind of communicating back to the cloud and telling what it sees.
The common cloud infrastructure could basically help the rest of the traffic as well, on a certain route. There is a lot of work that’s going on, on the cameras, the car that I drove from Stuttgart to our test track in Edmonton, and certainly, you know, I saw the role the camera plays in keeping the lane and switching to a to the next lane, in kind of deciding what’s ahead of it and kind of making decisions based on that.
Vision-based systems are here to stay, they are going to replace our vision in some way to just keep it simple for you. And the computer power behind is going to take away the logic of deciding what to do with what you see right and keep it really simple.
Now, on the other hand, we have a second use case that we debuted with our GLC on the interior camera. Again, vision but for making more intuitive decisions within the car, when you go buy a Mercedes-Benz, the customer has kind of already opted for luxury, and you’d like to have it as intuitively responding to you as possible.
Three years ago already, we debuted our first gesture control systems within the GLC, you can also find it in cars in India. The GLCs that we sell, if you actually gestured within the car, either to a switch over to the boat or to the core driver’s glove compartment, to certain knob buttons in the car. Depending on the use case that’s built into the car, the internal camera senses your movement, and the chips behind the software within the neural networks kind of take over the intelligence to decide on what you may have been pointing to and without you necessarily pushing buttons to help you take actions.
Today, if you reach out to a glove compartment, and if it’s dark outside, the lights automatically come on, because the camera senses if you want to open the glove compartment.
While this is kind of the first four or five basic use cases that have come in, we believe that when you have more cameras in sight, today, you have one in the front.
When the rear seat camera as well comes in and you turn it into a stereo camera, you basically can sense all four occupants in the car and can react very intuitively depending on whether you have a kid in the backseat, a pet on the backseat, whether you have an elderly one, you know, a shorter one, a lengthier one, depending on the inmates in the car, there are so many intuitive functions that we can come up with making your drive that much more enjoyable. Vision both within the car and outside the car is going to play a definitive role in the features that we offer to our customers.
What does the future of the sector look like if it is talking from a holistic point of view, not just from the luxury car point of view?
All three together are connected, autonomous and electric. At some point, we were also discussing shared mobility until Covid hit us and people started to prefer private mobility in some form. But I still think there’s a scope to discuss how people really want to go from point A to point B.
And in the end, whether it’s medical devices at home, smartphones and all the payments and apps that you consume, or entertainment that you consume, technology is here to make life simpler for all of us. And talking about mobility. If you want to take the dread out of driving, and you don’t want to do it from point A to point B, in luxury or not, you just have to have time back in your hands, because your car is automated driving, I really think technology is going to make life simpler.
And today, it’s the three dots – connected, autonomous, and electric – there could be a fourth and a fifth that coming in the sense of how much time end user is going to get in an automated car simply giving us so many ideas of what you can do in the car. You could turn it into a car office, you could have a meeting in that, if you have the right screen and the right digital tools connected, you could have entertainment, if you’re going on a family holiday and you know, driving out from city A to city B, and you have all the time in your hands because the cars driving itself and negotiating the highway traffic, you probably just need a bigger screen and a nice streaming service to be able to do what you want to do.
I think all of these technologies are getting there to make life simpler and make driving a completely different experience in the years ahead.
You have been actively working from India for the global brand. What is your view on how we can bridge the industry-academia gap?
Over time, we’ve seen that academia has changed quite a lot. There’ll always be a gap, you know because these technologies are really cutting edge and we’re getting there. But I think over two decades, the industry is also used to bridging that gap going ahead.
I’m not saying it’s all perfect and nice. But there’s a steady improvement, both in terms of how much academia is catching up with the number of engineers we do find good engineers we find and the fact that the industry is also jumping ahead in terms of what technology it uses in its products.
I’m totally upbeat about this. And I can see it right. It’s reflected in numbers. It’s reflected in business. We have experienced the US so much. We’ve seen Europe a lot in terms of engineering R&D, and we have been exposed to East Europe. And I’ve seen what is possible there. We have seen China and you know, some great talent in China that is right now locked to the region and supporting product development there. And then there’s India with 1.2 billion people with a million graduates coming out, english speaking, eager, age-wise, very energetic, and passionate to solve some of these issues. I am very optimistic that you know that we are here to, in fact, solve many more such engineering and product-related challenges in the years to come.
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