Yahoo Autos The Mercedes-Benz ESF Is a One-Car Showcase of the Way Safety Will Look in Vehicles of the Future
Mercedes's Experimental Safety Vehicle is a GLE-class SUV with safety gear onboard to show what the automotive future will look like.
Autonomous driving is taken as a given, but Mercedes-Benz is thinking about how traditional safety equipment-starting with seatbelts and airbags-can change to make it even more safe.
That's all fine, but we're most fascinated by the robot that deploys from a ramp after a crash and scurries up the road, where it raises a small reflective road triangle.
We couldn't have written a more compelling introduction to the Mercedes-Benz ESF 2019 safety vehicle than its maker, so why try? According to Mercedes, "The Experimental Safety Vehicle (ESF) 2019 incorporates more than one dozen trailblazing safety innovations in tangible form." Tangible the ESF is-it's pretty much a GLE-class SUV festooned with futuristic, Tomorrowland safety gear to show the world where automotive safety could be in the years to come.
The last ESF designed by Mercedes came in 2009-there's a long history of ESFs stretching back to the 1970s-back when autonomous driving wasn't nearly as close to the brink of commercialization as it is today. Now, with self-driving cars seemingly on the horizon and being tested in the real world, Mercedes has shifted its safety focus with the ESF to address safety in the autonomous age. Put another way, while the ESF 2009's futuristic tech was autonomous driving, the ESF 2019's is how to approach safety assuming autonomous driving is the norm.
Most striking in Benz's thinking is the idea that, when cars drive themselves, there will still be a need for in-car occupant safety measures, including seatbelts, airbags, and more-because Mercedes firmly believes that even autonomous cars will still crash. We think this is smart thinking. After all, the likelihood of nothing ever going wrong in a self-driving car is, well, low. Below, we've broken out the ESF 2019's boundary-pushing safety features by their intended functions:
Protecting Occupants by Avoiding a Crash
The primary goal of self-driving cars, as well as the active-safety features such as lane-keep assist and adaptive cruise control that enable semi-autonomous driving today, is to avoid accidents altogether. To that end, the ESF 2019 boasts a few new developments in active safety, including the ability to accelerate in order to avoid a rear-end collision (as in, a car approaching from behind that isn't stopping) and 360-degree pedestrian detection and protection (the car will react to and avoid people and cyclists while parking and driving).
Protecting Occupants in the Event of a Crash
As we mentioned earlier, Mercedes's stance that self-driving cars will still crash (into one another, or human-driven cars) is interesting. Benz thus isn't giving up on in-car safety features to protect occupants from crash forces. To encourage seatbelt use, the ESF 2019 boasts heated seatbelts and belt buckles with handy USB ports. Mercedes has come up with a child seat that includes its Pre-SAFE tech (essentially, if a crash seems imminent, the seat automatically cinches the child's belts tight-just like it's done on production Benz's seatbelts for a generation), as well as video- and heart-rate monitoring for the child in the child seat.
Since everyone seems to think that when cars drive themselves, seating arrangements within them will be freed up, allowing for swiveling chairs, etc., Mercedes has a plan for that: More enveloping airbags. In a traditional vehicle, every seat (typically) faces forward-certainly those facing airbags do. Those won't be very effective if, say, an occupant is facing a different direction.
Therefore the ESF 2019's front seats (which face forward and don't swivel, by the way) boast seat-mounted airbags that deploy from, essentially, the bolsters that cocoon occupants so that their limbs and other body parts don't strike one another's. (GM has a similar take on this idea: A center airbag between the front seats, which is already in production.) There remains a driver airbag in the steering wheel, but the wheel (as well as the pedals) retract into the dashboard when the ESF 2019 is in self-driving mode, to reduce potential injuries from impacts with those protrusions. There also is a clever new rear-seat airbag, mounted in each front seatback (sorry, middle rear passenger) that's only partially pressurized. For those drivers who still insist on driving, the ESF also features a "vitalizing" interior light setup-essentially a blue-light array that mimics daylight to keep the driver refreshed-feeling.
Communicating with Other Cars and Pedestrians
The final piece of the self-driving future the ESF 2019 aims to conquer is how an autonomous car might communicate with pedestrians, other drivers, and other vehicles and express its intentions. Human drivers can rely on eye contact, spirited honking, and hand signals (good and bad) to negotiate four-way stops, crosswalks, and other on-road interactions. A self-driving car ideally isn't sentient, but should try to bridge the communication gap with humans, an exchange Mercedes refers to as "cooperative communication."
Thus, the ESF 2019 is capable of displaying text messages in its grille and back window, as well as graphics intended to mimic, say, waving a pedestrian across the road or telling traffic behind that the ESF has been involved in an accident and to stay clear. More creepily, but useful, is the feature in which lights on the forward two LIDAR sensors (there are two more mounted to the rear of the ESF's roof) "follow" pedestrians at crosswalks in an effort to emulate a human's eye contact and express to the pedestrians that the car is aware it is there and won't barrel over them.
We'll skip right past the interesting but ultimately rather lame electroluminescent paint stripes on each side of the body capable of flashing and such to enhance the ESF's visibility to other motorists (cool, gigantic turn signals!) and get to the vehicles' best feature: Its safety Roomba. Okay, so the little robot that deploys from beneath the ESF 2019's rear bumper isn't a Roomba, nor does it clean anything-but it sort of resembles a Roomba. It deploys from a little ramp in the event of an accident (post-crash), and scurries itself a ways up the road, where it raises a small reflective road triangle to caution drivers approaching from behind.
After the ESF 2019 debuts at the 2019 ESV convention in the Netherlands, you can expect at least some of its out-there tech to trickle into a production Mercedes in the future, as did many of the ESF 2009's features. While Mercedes wouldn't say which of the latest ESF's widgets might make the leap into production in the near future, we'd hazard a guess that the rear-seat airbag, heated seatbelts, and expanded sensor capabilities (for enhanced semi-autonomous functionality) are givens.
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