独家专访:奔驰自动驾驶概念车背后的两位主导者和他们的疯狂创想
2015-04-22 20:55
|Don’t call the Mercedes F 015 a “car.” In fact, our automotive lexicon doesn’t yet have a word for the sculpted-aluminum land-bound spaceship-limousine. The name F 015, pronounced ef-oh-one-five to avoid confusion with the F15 fighter plane, doesn’t help establish a vehicular classification.
Follow these clues. It’s the length of a full-size sedan. It has four large wheels set to its corners. It moves around without a human being behind the steering wheel. And it packs all traditional cargo spaces with an arsenal of computers running at full tilt. The whir of fans to keep processors from overheating is the only sound of its core operations—although it can communicate, when it sees a need, with pedestrians via a Siri-like voice, through laser-beamed messages on the pavement, and in swirls of animated lights displayed on its large open front and rear grilles using a symbolic language of its own invention.
I recently had a somewhat bumpy 20-minute ride in the almost-sensuous vehicle-robot. The experience was like being in a first-class single-cabin rail car on virtual tracks. It would not have been out of place at Disneyworld—except that the F 015 is a one-off, the single product of more than four years of Mercedes research. The vehicle is insured at about $12 million.
After my ride, I sat down with the two men most responsible for bringing the F 015 from futuristic hallucination to a tangible full-scale ride-worthy research platform for the future of autonomous mobility. Alexander Mankowsky is a futurist in Daimler’s society and technology group, and Holger Hutzenlaub, a leader of advanced design group in Germany, was based in Mercedes’s Tokyo studio when the project commenced.
The first spark of inspiration occurred in 2007, when Mankowsky—trained as a sociologist—witnessed student engineers competing in a challenge to run a self-driving car through a city environment, at the Urban Challenge held by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a program of the U.S. Department of Defense.
The Interview:
Alex Mankowsky: Before the Urban Challenge, I was already working on mobility cultures. People behave differently in different regions. They develop a culture. It’s different in Manhattan than in San Francisco, and so on.
Bradley Berman: Did you think about nomadic cultures?
AM: Yes, sure. Nomadic cultures mean you have everything with you. You are a moving village. It’s very funny stuff, which you can see in documentary, avant-garde and mainstream movies, including science fiction.
BB: Like the road movie genre?
AM: Yeah, road movies are important because you always have a dilemma and conflict with the perception of freedom and moving with the car, and the rules and regulations that define a street, and the police. Road movies are always ending with a bad outcome for freedom, like Thelma and Louise and Convoy. In a way, the Star Trek stories are a road movie too, a kind of mobile Socialist community between the stars.
Holger Hutzenlaub: In 2011, we organized a workshop with the main city planners and architects of Tokyo. We invited Alex, and our own autonomous driving engineers. It was the first time we had a think-tank situation with people from different parts of the company across the globe.
AM: The explicit goal was, in three days, to create sketches for different future scenarios and for designers and planners to go home from Tokyo and make future scenarios for their own cities.
HH: It didn’t matter if it was the U.S. studio or the Italian studio. They had to come up with a vision, a two-dimensional picture of his or her main city, and how it would look in 10 or 20 years ahead.
AM: These futures used different mobility devices. You can’t say cars. One concept was the “loop city,” with different mobility devices for different routes, in which you can drive different durations. There were moving sidewalks, and even stranger ideas like moving gardens. The F 015 is one example, the one from Tokyo.