Mercedes Dreams of Turning the Car Into a Luxury Lounge - Bloomberg

Mercedes-Benz aims to transform the car into a rolling luxury lounge that chauffeurs passengers autonomously.

In the F 015 concept vehicle, the front seats can swivel to the rear as the steering wheel recedes into the instrument panel and the car takes control. Sculpted open-pore walnut wood veneers and ice-white leather add to the chill-out ambiance of the interior, while six screens allow passengers to interact with the machine via touch, hand gestures and eye-tracking.

"The car is growing beyond its role as a mere means of transport and will ultimately become a mobile living space," said Dieter Zetsche, chief executive officer of Mercedes parent Daimler AG. (DAI) He presented the vehicle today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The so-called Luxury in Motion prototype is part of an effort by upscale automakers to counter Google Inc.'s push for self-piloting cars as big-city congestion makes the thrill of driving less of a selling point. An automated Audi A7 concluded a 560-mile (900-kilometer) journey in Las Vegas today, while last year the Volkswagen AG unit tried to show that automation and performance can go hand in hand by showing an unmanned RS7 driving at racing speeds.

Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

The Daimler AG Mercedes-Benz F015 concept vehicle is presented at a news conference during the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, on Jan. 5, 2015. Close

The Daimler AG Mercedes-Benz F015 concept vehicle is presented at a news conference... Read More

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Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

The Daimler AG Mercedes-Benz F015 concept vehicle is presented at a news conference during the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, on Jan. 5, 2015.

French Doors

Mercedes plans to bring some of the technology in its futuristic prototype to the streets soon, offering an option for automated highway driving before the end of the decade. The feature will allow the vehicle to steer itself at speeds as fast as 120 kilometers (75 miles) per hour. That would follow the Stop&Go Pilot that takes control in traffic jams and is already being rolled out in vehicles from the C-Class sedan to the S-Class.

The Mercedes highway feature is similar to a super cruise control system from General Motors Co. (GM), which plans to equip Cadillac cars with the technology from 2017.

In the Mercedes concept car, the expansive interior of the sedan is made possible by a 3.6-meter (12-foot) wheelbase, which is nearly two feet longer than the standard S-Class. There's also no support pillar between the front and rear doors, which swing outward from the center like French doors to make getting in and out easier.

If the driver does want to take control of the vehicle, she can turn toward the front, and the steering wheel will slide automatically from the dashboard. Still, the car isn't really designed to be driven but rather to let the passengers interact with each other and the outside world while in transit.

Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

The Daimler AG Mercedes-Benz F015 concept vehicle is presented at a news conference during the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, on Jan. 5, 2015. Close

The Daimler AG Mercedes-Benz F015 concept vehicle is presented at a news conference... Read More

Open

Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

The Daimler AG Mercedes-Benz F015 concept vehicle is presented at a news conference during the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, on Jan. 5, 2015.

"It really feels great to work for a company that is crazy enough to finally bring this vision of driver-free mobility closer to reality," Zetsche said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Dorothee Tschampa in Frankfurt at dtschampa@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Chris Reiter at creiter2@bloomberg.net Naomi Kresge

Source : http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-06/mercedes-plots-turning-the-car-into-a-luxury-lounge.html

I Rode 500 Miles in a Self-Driving Car and Saw the Future. It's Delightfully Dull - Wired

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I was a few hours outside of Los Angeles, tooling down I-5 at the wheel of a sleek Audi A7 on a gorgeous day when a little girl in an SUV smiled and waved. I waved back.

With both hands.

This immediately freaked her out, and she started jumping up and down. All I could do was laugh, knowing my vigorous wave was in no way a safety hazard. In fact, I hadn't touched the steering wheel in more than an hour.

What that little girl didn't know, despite the stickers on the car, was that I was piloting Audi's latest autonomous vehicle, a prototype designed specifically to handle the monotony of highway driving. The, er, driving was not nearly so difficult as the preparation—an arduous task that required a day of training in Arizona, a ream of paperwork and a little bureaucratic wrangling that resulted in the great state of California issuing me a license to operate an autonomous vehicle.

And so it was that I found myself riding along in the car of tomorrow on an autonomous road trip from Palo Alto, California to Las Vegas, where Audi is showing off autonomous tech that may be in showrooms by the end of the decade.

If this A7, nicknamed Jack, wasn't advertising "Audi piloted driving" on its side, you'd never know it wasn't just another German sedan cruising down the 5. All the gadgetry that keeps it squarely centered in its lane at precisely the speed you select is discretely incorporated into the car. It's top-end stuff, too: six radars, three cameras, and two light detection and ranging (LIDAR) units. The computers that allow the car to analyze the road, choose the optimal path and stick to it fit neatly in the trunk. It's remarkably smooth, maintaining a safe following distance, making smooth lane changes, and politely moving to the left to pass slower vehicles controlled by carbon-based life forms. It's so sophisticated that I never felt anything unusual, and in fact the car is designed to reassure you that you need only grab the wheel or tap the brake to immediately resume control.

And that's the most remarkable thing about Audi's robo-car: All that tech recedes into the background. Driving this car is mundane, almost boring. My interaction with that little girl was the most exciting part of the trip. And Audi couldn't be happier about that.

A Baby Step into the Future

It should be said straight away that Jack was designed specifically for highway driving, which, by its nature, tends to be largely uneventful. Now, developing autonomous tech that works only on the highway may not seem impressive when you consider Google's racked up more than 700,000 miles in its autonomous vehicles and has developed a prototype that doesn't even have a steering wheel. It may even seem like a glorified version of adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning and other semi-autonomous tech you can get on many high-end sedans these days.

But the autonomous A7 represents one of the biggest steps forward any automaker has taken toward the day when we're all simply along for the ride. It's a prototype, yes, but Audi says this technology will be in production cars within three to five years.

Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Audi, like every major automaker experimenting with autonomous driving tech, sees many hurdles—the technology, yes, but also regulatory issues, insurance questions, and consumer acceptance—that must be cleared before we have cars that drive themselves in all places at all times. So it is nibbling away at the edges, planning to introduce autonomous features one by one. It's a slower timeline than Google's "moonshot" approach, but one that gives everyone time to accept the technology.

"We call is a revolution by evolution. We will take it step by step, and add more functionality, add more usefulness to the system," says Thomas Ruchatz, Audi's head of driver assistance systems and integrated safety. Full autonomy is "not going to happen just like that," where from one day to the next "we can travel from our doorstep to our work and we don't have a steering wheel in the car."

Audi's been developing this technology for more than a decade, and has made remarkable progress in the past five years. In 2009, an autonomous TTS hit 130 mph on the Bonneville salt flats and carved the brand's four-ring logo into the ground. The next year, the same car completed the winding course to the summit of Pikes Peak—a 12.42-mile ribbon of asphalt with 156 turns–in 27 minutes. That's far slower than Sebastien Loeb's record-setting pace of 8 minutes and 13.9 seconds, but nevertheless impressive for a car controlled exclusively by silicon and steel. The TTS lapped Thunderhill Raceway Park in 2012, and an autonomous RS7 hit 150 mph on the Hockenheimring F1 track in October.

Racetracks are impressive, but they're controlled environments. The real test is on the road. Last year, Audi rolled into CES with a car that could park itself and drive itself through stop-and-go traffic. These features, called, appropriately enough, Parking Pilot and Traffic Jam Pilot, should hit the market before long. Highway Pilot, the tech crammed into the A7 that I piloted down I5, is essentially a more sophisticated version of Traffic Jam Pilot and will follow that to market.

Learning Not to Drive

They don't let just anyone behind the wheel of an autonomous car. California and Nevada—two of the four states and Washington, D.C., that have adopted regulations governing autonomous vehicles on the road—have reams of rules that must be followed. One of them dictates that anyone who gets behind the wheel must be properly trained.

For Audi, this means learning to be a better than average driver. The way Audi sees it, anyone given the responsibility of piloting this device on public roads had damned well be up to the task of taking over, because if you need to grab the wheel, the odds are something's gone terribly amiss. A nicer way of saying this is it takes a lot of skill to be better than Audi's robot.

Hit these two buttons simultaneously to trigger piloted mode. Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

I was trained at Volkswagen's proving grounds outside Chandler, Arizona (VW is Audi's corporate parent). The day started with a warning that I'd have a better than average chance of experiencing some car sickness, and Audi's security Was. Not. Kidding about there being absolutely, positively no photography. As if to underscore that point, my phone was locked in a secure box when I arrived and a security guard escorted me everywhere.

The proving ground resembles Tatooine, minus the landspeeders and banthas, and it sits downwind of a farm with millions of chickens. There's not a lot to suggest Audi is doing a lot of really cool work here. This is where VW puts its cars through hell, tuning them and adjusting them on a high speed oval, a pair of smaller tracks and an outrageously bumpy stretch of road. There's even a huge shallow pool and a dirt oval, which would probably be lots of fun in an Audi TTS or VW GTI.

After an orientation session in a dreary office where every sign is posted in English and German (a language in which everything sounds like an admonishment), we headed for the track. VW's instructors, who have forgotten more than you've ever known about driving, led me through a slew of exercises in a GTI that's been driven hard. I had to drive a slalom, then drive it in reverse. I mastered emergency braking and evasive turning and skid recovery. They even made me hone my parking skills. It was a day-long lesson in fundamentals that everyone ought to master before being issued a license. It also was, for the most part, a blast.

Once everyone was confident I knew what I was doing, they taught me how to operate the autonomous A7. This took all of five minutes. Basically, you wait until the car's system determines it's safe to turn on autopilot (meaning you're cruising on a highway, and not near an exit or entrance ramp), then you press two steering wheel mounted buttons simultaneously and let go. It couldn't be easier. That's by design. Even as Audi engineers were developing the backend tech that lets the car handle itself, a design team was honing the UI based on extensive focus group testing in Europe, China, and the US. "We really want to make sure customers understand it," says Jurg Schlinkheider, Audi's head of driver assistance systems.

They did an excellent job. Much like the car's exterior, the interior appears utterly stock at first glance. But little things identify it as something special. A small screen below the main infotainment screen tells you when piloted mode is available, when it's active, and when it will shut off. A line of LEDs stretches along the dash. The lights change color to pass along similar info: they glow bluish-green when the car's doing the work, yellow when it's time to resume control, and red when you're in command. And there are two buttons along the bottom of the steering wheel—one for each thumb—that you press simultaneously to activate piloted mode.

To communicate the transfer of responsibility to the autonomous system, the steering wheel retracts a few inches. It's just far enough to make it clear you are no longer in charge, but close enough to grab if things go sideways. Because Highway Pilot is for highway driving only, the car makes it abundantly clear when you need to resume driving when, say, the highway ends or your exit approaches. Audi's UI experts chose a combination of audio and visual alerts. Fifteen seconds before the transfer, the bluish-green LEDs turn yellow and a voice tells you autopilot will be turned off. Ten seconds before the transfer, the LEDs turn red and the steering wheel extends to meet you. If you fail to respond, the car activates its hazard lights and slows to a stop, moving to the shoulder if possible.

The A7's trunk now holds eight PCs, which will be condensed into one unit the size of an iPad for the consumer version. Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Turning off piloted mode is easy: Hit the two buttons on the wheel, press the gas or brake pedal, or grab the wheel with a bit of force and you're in control again. It's just that fast. And it's remarkably sophisticated—drumming your fingers on the wheel (perhaps out of boredom) doesn't do anything, but even the slightest turn will shut off piloted mode. "We put a lot of effort into … making it feel right, so to speak," says project leader Daniel Lipinski.

I was supposed to take the autonomous A7 out for a few laps on VW's high-speed oval, but a glitch with the adaptive cruise control sidelined the car. Lipinski tried some quick fixes—which, as with all gadgets, included powering down and restarting—to no avail. We gave up for the night and headed for the hotel. Of course, we were halfway there when the engineers solved the problem. They hopped in and met us on the road.

And so it was that I found myself behind the wheel of an autonomous vehicle for the first time. I wasn't confined to the safety of a track, but on a busy street, among real people in real cars—at night. The issue here is the street has traffic signals, which the Highway Pilot system is not programmed to recognize (you don't see a lot of traffic signals on I5 or I10). So I used piloted mode for cruising along, then reverted to manual mode when approaching intersections. Lipinski suggested I let the car do all the work, since it is programmed to maintain a safe following distance and avoid hitting anything in front of it. Audi's engineers hadn't tried this before, butLipinski had enough confidence in the tech to let me be the first to test it.

Damned if it didn't work at the next light, bringing the car to a safe stop two car lengths behind the guy in front of us. "We didn't know it would do that!" Lipinski said with some excitement. That hammers home a fundamental point about autonomous technology: It is remarkably advanced, yet still in its infancy. It works very well, yes. But we don't really know exactly how well. And it may, for better or worse, very well surprise us with what it can do.

Safety and Comfort, Little by Little

Once I made peace with the fact I wasn't in control of the car—something that took roughly four minutes—seeing that little girl freak out was the most exciting part of the drive. Frankly, autonomous vehicles are boring. That's how it's meant to be: Piloted driving is about safety and comfort.

Every decision the car makes comes down to two questions: Is it possible (i.e., safe and legal) and is it beneficial (i.e., does it make the ride more comfortable). Tuning the system to properly assess and balance these two things and speed up, slow down, change lanes, or make turns smoothly has been key to developing the technology. At one point during my drive, the A7 moved effortlessly into a relatively small slot in the right lane to make way for a faster car approaching from behind. It was seamless. That kind of decision-making and maneuvering is quite advanced, yet needs fine tuning before commercial production can begin. Audi's team hasn't yet worked through every situation the car may encounter, or settled on a balance between maintaining a steady course and making tiny adjustments to avoid every single tiny thing the sensors pick up.

As my excitement turned to boredom—I5 just goes on and on and on and on, and then you've got I15—it became easy to see Highway Pilot as a feature drivers will embrace. And it suggests Audi and other automakers are on the right track rolling out autonomous tech one or two features at a time. Knowing I can immediately resume control of the car, and feeling a conventional steering wheel in my hands and pedals beneath my feet, makes the transition to being chauffeured by a robot easier to embrace. It's a more sophisticated version of the adaptive cruise control we're already using. In that way, the A7 isn't a self-driving car, it's a luxury sedan that can, with my approval, make driving safer, easier and more relaxing. "Our experience is that our customer wants to accept first and understand first what they are getting, and what the limitations are as well," says Schlinkheider. "Accept our function, and learn first how it works, and get used to i! t."

A piecemeal approach also is easier for automakers, and regulators. Making one swift jump to fully autonomous driving, as Google is pursuing, requires perfecting all of the technology and considering every possible scenario. The car must know exactly what to do, everywhere, under every condition. It's a massive undertaking, and it's easy to see why the automakers want to take things one step at a time.

Audi is allowed to test its car in California and Nevada, but the states have different regulations—and license plates. Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

Shortly after crossing into Nevada, we pull over in Primm, a dusty town with a couple of casinos, an outlet mall and about 400 people. We've got to swap the license plates, because California and Nevada have different rules regulating autonomous vehicles. It underscores why Audi and other automakers want to see the feds take the lead regulating such cars. "It's good to have clear regulations, on what to do to test those systems safely," Lipinski says. The patchwork of rules is, at this point, one impediment to marketing Highway Pilot. As the rules in each state currently stand, autonomous technology is limited to prototypes, not production vehicles.

Building the Central Brain

There are other challenges to marketing this tech, not the least of which is packaging all the sensors and computers. Consumers don't want a car that looks like it was used to rob a CompUSA. Each of the eight PCs in the back of our A7 serves a different function. They control data logging, planning a path, controlling steering, braking, and acceleration, operating the near field cameras, and fusing sensor data. When it's time to go to market, Audi will consolidate these functions in a single computer, called the zentrale Fahrerassistenzsteuergerät, or zFAS. It's "a central brain like the one we have in our head," says Thomas Meuller, Audi's head of development of braking, steering, and driver assistance systems. Two years ago, the zFAS filled the trunk. When Audi rolled into CES last year, it was a bit smaller than a shoebox. By the time Highway Pilot sees production, it will be the size of an iPad.

The car I took to Sin City hasn't seen that downsizing in tech because it's a research vehicle. Working with individual PCs makes it easier to tinker with the software, and this phase of development involves a whole lot of tinkering. There's no sense in combining the parts until they're much closer to a final product. The idea, Schlinkheider says, is "just be super flexible, try out different things. And then when it comes to series production, to the option that our customer can buy later on, that all will be running on the zFAS controller."

After the drive from Silicon Valley to Vegas, the car feels ready for showrooms. But Audi says there's more work to do. The rules that govern how the car adjusts its speed and position need more fine tuning, for example. The Audi team has put some 50,000 miles on the Highway Pilot feature, and will rack up many more before going public. From deer to sinkholes, highways hold a lot of potential hazards, and the system has to be prepared for them.

During my time at the wheel, I never needed to take control from the car, except to take an exit. I turned the system on and off to get a feel for how it works, but I only felt the need to grab the wheel once–and only then to accommodate the Audi camera crew in a passing car. The photographer wanted me to move into the right lane. The lane change would be safe, yes, but not beneficial, because it would put me behind a lumbering truck.

The car didn't see the logic in that, and had no reason to oblige the photographer's request, so I grabbed the wheel, put on my turn signal, and changed lanes. It was almost as exciting as spooking the girl in the SUV.

Source : http://www.wired.com/2015/01/rode-500-miles-self-driving-car-saw-future-boring/

Tuesday, January 6, 2015

BMW's Self-Driving Car Parks Itself And Picks You Up When You're Ready To Go - Forbes

While Audi may have won all the cool points for sending one of its self-driving cars on a 550 mile trip to Las Vegas for CES, BMW also has a few tricks up its sleeve.

On the top floor of a Las Vegas casino garage, the company demonstrated how a modified version of its BMW i3 electric car can autonomously park itself and then can come pick you up when you're ready to go–BMW calls it the Remote Valet Parking Assistant.

"You can send your car away to look for a parking spot, go shopping and then comes back again when you're finished," said Huber.

In the demonstration, BMW used a Samsung smartwatch to issue the commands to retrieve the car. The app on watch also shows the status of the car.

To get readings of its environment, the car is equipped with four laser scanners on each side of the car. BMW also needs a map of the garage. From there, the car's algorithm can sift through the map and the information coming off the sensors to find a parking spot.

Having to get a map of every single parking garage seems rather impractical for this feature to take off. Werner Huber, head of the research group for driver assistance at BMW,  said it can start retrieving the maps straight from garage operators. For the demo, the BMW team created the map of the garage themselves.

Google also needs a map for its self-driving car.

At the demonstration, BMW also showed off a collision avoidance system using the same four laser scanners. The sensors detect when a collision looks immanent and automatically stops the cars within a few inches of the object.

Google has spurred many automakers to start getting serious about self-driving car technology. But like BMW, many are going slow and testing out self-driving features in tiny iterations.

"We appreciate what Google is doing since they're promoting the idea of the autonomous car and preparing the ground for us," said Huber. "But we are coming at it from another side. As a car manufacturer, we are very experienced in building car and we have to adopt more processes of an IT company."

He shied away from speculating on the idea of partnering with Google for its autonomous driving technology, but admitted it was necessary for a company like BMW to start partnering in this new space.

So how long before we start seeing this in BMW cars? The self-driving technology is still in development at the research stage, but the company thinks it can introduce it into the market in five to eight years, said Huber. One issue is simply the cost of the sensors, which would scare away most consumers. The other is the issue of legality–especially in Germany where there are explicit bans on any kind of autonomous driving. "Often the technology is ready, but the legal framework is unclear," said Huber.

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Source : http://www.forbes.com/sites/aarontilley/2015/01/06/bmws-self-driving-car-parks-itself-and-picks-you-up-when-youre-ready-to-go/

Mercedes Unveils Self-Driving, Pollution-Free Car At CES 2015 - Newsweek

Just outside the Cosmopolitan hotel, where beads of shimmering glass stretch for several stories over blackjack gamblers and women nonchalantly dance bar-top, hundreds of tourists and journalists gathered late last night to gawk at a sleek gunmetal-silver car floating its way down the Las Vegas Strip.

But when it opened, no driver stepped out. The car had been driving itself.

Dubbed the Mercedes-Benz F015 Luxury in Motion, this automobile is fully autonomous and produces no carbon emissions whatsoever, said Dieter Zetsch, head of the German company. It is powered by a battery and a fuel cell that produces electricity by combining hydrogen with oxygen to create water.

When these two gases combine, they release energy that can can be harnessed. Challenges in the past have involved safely storing hydrogen, which is combustible, especially under pressure.  But this car houses the gas in super-strong cylinders placed between the wheels, where they are unlikely to be damaged even in a bad accident, said Ralf Herrtwich, a senior engineer with the company.

The automobile looks like something out of The Jetsons—if the Jetsons could afford a Benzo and had more earthbound tastes—and features four swiveling chairs that allow people in the car to face each other. Or, perhaps, spin in circles while playing Angry Birds.

The idea is to let driver and passengers interact during a ride, said Ralf Herrtwich, a senior engineer with the company.

Google has created several cars, such as modified versions of the Toyota Prius, that can drive themselves. So a self-driving car is not new. But it's safe to say that this is the most premium and fully-realized autonomous automobile yet to see the light of day.

"We are the first ones to show how the interior of a car is [ideally] modified in autonomous driving," Herrtwich said.

To this end, he explained, the car is built using a "carriage" concept, with the wheels put as far as possible toward the edges of the vehicle to allow space in the center for a driver and passengers. And its interior features gleaming panels that can can project a front-facing view of the car as it trundles along (or what would be seen out the windshield), meant to prevent the backward-facing driver from getting car-sick, Herrtwich noted.

The interior of the car. Mercedes-Benz Several displays toward the front let the driver see where the car is going and how fast, and allows them to text or make calls, surf the web or look for restaurant recommendations, he said.  

"Most gadgets take up your time," Zetsch said. "But autonomous cars like this one will become mobile homes, in the best sense of the word," giving drivers the time and wherewithal do whatever they want while they get to their destination.

But don't expect it any time soon. Herrtwich said that they anticipate that the car could be available to the general public around 2030. Something similar may be available sooner, but may be too expensive for most consumers, he added.

The car created a stir on the Vegas Strip. Doug Main The car can travel about 200 kilometers (125 miles) on the power of its batteries, which are charged by being plugged in. Once these are spent, the hydrogen fuel cell is activated, which can provide power to drive another 900 km (550 miles), Herrtwich said.

The car recognizes its surroundings with a series of cameras and radar sensors, and is much better than humans at avoiding accidents, Herrtwich said.

Other cool features include a grill that glows blue when the car is in autonomous mode, but which is white when manually driven—and yes, it still includes a steering wheel and allows drivers to…drive, if they choose. (Maybe by 2030 there will be another word for the person helming the non-steering controls of a self-driving car.) This LED-studded grill also glows a darker shade of blue when it senses a pedestrian. The car can then project an image of a crosswalk in front of it, to signal to a person that it is safe to cross the road. 

Source : http://www.newsweek.com/mercedes-unveils-self-driving-pollution-free-car-ces-2015-297160

Two ways we'll interact with tomorrow's self-driving cars - CNET

Valeo's InBlue technology will put vehicle information and a virtual key on the driver's wrist. Valeo

LAS VEGAS -- First it showcased a car that could automatically valet-park itself, then a Cruise4U system that handles highway cruising for you. Now, here at the 2015 International CES, automotive tech provider Valeo is demonstrating two new ways that we'll interact with the self-driving cars of the future: with its Mobius adaptive information display and InBlue smartphone and smartwatch virtual-key tech.

As a guy who hates having a heavy keychain in his pocket, for me Valeo's InBlue tech is the more interesting and immediate of the two announcements. This virtual key system will allow drivers to ditch their car keys and bulky key fobs and use a smartphone or smartwatch to unlock and start the vehicle.

Valeo envisions that this tech, which will be available in the next few years, will also put remote monitoring of the vehicle's fuel level, tire pressure, mileage and service intervals,! GPS location and more right on the driver's wrist. "There will be no more looking for your keys and no more looking for your car," says Jean-Francois Tarabbia, Valeo senior vice president of Research, Development and Product Marketing, also pointing out that our smart devices are always with us and that InBlue-enabled cars will be GPS-connected.

Looking a bit ahead, Valeo hopes that drivers will be able to simply walk out of the front door and automatically summon their Valet Park4U self-driving car from a nearby parking deck simply by checking their wrist. The supplier also thinks that smartphone virtual-key technology will help with the spread of car-sharing services, which it claims 4 out of 10 European drivers are interested in.

The Mobius concept dashboard transitions between modes for autonomous and manual driving. Valeo

Mobius, on the other hand, is much more conceptual. This dashboard is designed as a demonstration of how autonomous cars could display different information depending on whether they're under manual or machine control.

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The concept starts with the now-familiar fully digital instrument cluster and adds a pair of small touchscreens to the steering wheel. When the driver is in command of the vehicle, this trio of screens displays a simplified interface, providing low-distraction infotainment. When the driver activates the autonomous driving mode, the displays change to a more smartphone-like interface, giving access to media, apps, and smartphone and tablet mirroring via HDMI or wireless display standards such as Miracast, Chromecast or AirPlay.

While the car is driving itself, the driver can interact with media or even mirror apps. Valeo

In Valeo's vision, the driver will be able to watch videos or answer email while the car is negotiating stop-and-go traffic or handling a mundane freeway cruise. I'm not 100 percent sold on the idea of watching YouTube at 70 mph, but this is just a very forward-looking concept. In reality, legislation will probably keep a dashboard like Mobius from reaching production for many years to come; many years in which autonomous-driving tech will have time to mature and prove itself.

Source : http://www.cnet.com/news/valeo-mobius-concept-dashboard-inblue-virtual-key-at-ces-2015/

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