Stuttgart, Germany (BBN)-Imagine this: You call up a limo. Within minutes, a luxurious Mercedes-Benz car arrives at you door. As you peek inside, you notice it has no driver.
The car’s door opens, you sit inside and enjoy the scenery as it silently glides through the city, leaving you at your desired destination, all by itself, reports the Mashable.
While not exactly launching such a service yet, Mercedes-Benz is definitely looking in this direction.
“This is a concrete development goal of ours,” Dieter Zetsche, CEO of Mercedes’ parent company Daimler, told Reuters in an interview at the Frankfurt auto show.
Such a service would be primarily aimed at customers who don’t care much about actually owning a vehicle, but are interested in premium transportation services.
Mercedes has a solid foundation to build such a service on. Daimler owns car rental service car2go as well as taxi rental app MyTaxi, and Mercedes has shown off a futuristic self-driving car prototype at CES 2015, as well as an autonomous truck in 2014.
Zetsche has a few more ideas on how to make such a service more useful. “It would be extremely practical if the car2go appeared without needing to be prompted, once my appointment in the calendar had come to an end,” he said.
The autonomous car space is heating up fast. Just yesterday, Google named industry veteran John Krafcik CEO of its self-driving car project, and other car manufacturers, such as Tesla and Toyota, are working on similar technology.
Still, the scenario described at the beginning of this piece is pretty far off.
Mercedes, for one, expects to have self-driving cars on the streets by 2025.
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