Will Mercedes Be Able to Sell This Advanced Tech in Cars?

• Mercedes-Benz is the first foreign automaker to receive permission to test SAE Level 4 prototypes on roads in Beijing, previewing tech it plans to offer in privately purchased vehicles.

• Until now, Level 4 has mostly been thought of as a technology for company-owned fleets of robotaxis and semitrucks with limited potential for private ownership, at least in this decade.

• The automaker has also been the first to offer SAE Level 3 cars in the US, albeit in a handful of states, offering eyes-off, hands-off driving on certain roads.

SAE Level 4 vehicles have been deployed in a number of countries in the past few years in small numbers, spanning robotaxis, robot delivery vehicles, and driverless trucks. And despite a few stumbles, driverless geofenced vehicles now seem like a question of scale, regulatory permission, and business considerations rather than technology.

Mercedes-Benz recently became the first foreign automaker to be permitted to test Level 4 vehicles on designated highways and urban roads in Beijing, following up on Level 3 testing in China that kicked off last year.

"The project focuses on studying multi-sensor perception in high-level automated driving, verifying system performance under various conditions, and exploring the deep integration of perception," the automaker notes.

It's a relatively small-scale testing program for now, using just two S‑Class models with lidar, radar, and camera sensor pods.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of this latest revelation isn't the fact that Mercedes-Benz is testing Level 4 vehicles per se, but that it plans to offer Level 4 tech in privately owned vehicles worldwide at some point in the future.

"With the new approval for testing Level 4 technology in the Beijing area, for later use in privately owned vehicles worldwide, Mercedes‑Benz leaps forward on the way to autonomous driving," said Markus Schäfer, Member of the Board of Management of Mercedes‑Benz Group AG, Chief Technology Officer, Development & Procurement.

Of course, this statement is aspirational for now, but for the past few years SAE Level 4 has been seen as something that will be aimed almost exclusively at commercial fleets, rather than privately owned vehicles for a variety of reasons.

First and foremost are the hardware costs involved and the complexity of letting Level 4 vehicles operate not just in downtown areas of a handful of carefully mapped cities, but potentially in hundreds of suburban areas spanning thousands of vehicles.

In other words, letting Waymo SAE Level 4 robotaxis roam parts of San Francisco and LA has been thought of as useful for fleet operations when there are paying customers, but less useful if automakers start selling robotaxis to private individuals to commute and run errands.

Current Level 4 operations have also required a sizable human staff working remotely behind the scenes almost 24/7, sorting out traffic issues that robotaxis invariably run into. Translating that vast remote staff to watch over the operation of privately owned vehicles is not something robotaxi developers have considered to be achievable on a wide scale, at least for now.

This is why privately owned Level 4 vehicles have not been seen as something particularly close to becoming a reality, despite the limited successes of some robotaxi fleets around the world.

Mercedes now appears to be turning that assumption on its head, suggesting that at some point in the future vehicle owners could have their car drive them to work with no driver attention or intervention required, perhaps even while sitting in the back seat.

Likewise, a Level 4 vehicle could, in theory, drive your kids to school, return home, and then go and pick them up in the afternoon all by itself. Ultimately, this is the point at which Level 4 could begin to overlap with Level 5, which has been the holy grail of autonomous vehicles research.

And we have to admit that once Mercedes-Benz or another automaker achieves privately owned Level 4 vehicles in some limited geographic areas, the distance to non-geofenced operation could largely be an issue of 3D mapping and regulatory permission.

Of course, it remains to be seen just where Mercedes will be permitted to sell privately owned vehicles with Level 4 autonomy. Selling cars with SAE Level 3 tech in just a couple of US states has been a difficult-enough undertaking for regulatory reasons, even with plenty of asterisks, and one that only Mercedes has been able to accomplish thus far.

Could there be a market for Mercedes S-Class sedans with SAE Level 4 tech in coming years, or will such tech remain too expensive near-term to be worthwhile? Let us know what you think in the comments.