German cars learning US traffic regulations

Mercedes-Benz is expanding its research activities in the US, now that it has received a licence permitting it to test autonomous vehicles on public roads in California. The company says it now plans to take autonomous driving to a new level in the US, despite the differences between US and German traffic systems, which it says are vast. While motoring in Germany commonly takes place on narrow roads, the roads in the USA are frequently wider and may have more than six or even eight lanes. Traffic lights
September 19, 2014 Read time: 3 mins
1685 Mercedes-Benz is expanding its research activities in the US, now that it has received a licence permitting it to test autonomous vehicles on public roads in California.

The company says it now plans to take autonomous driving to a new level in the US, despite the differences between US and German traffic systems, which it says are vast. While motoring in Germany commonly takes place on narrow roads, the roads in the USA are frequently wider and may have more than six or even eight lanes. Traffic lights are installed on the opposite side of the road, there are numerous scenarios for merging onto roads and at a so-called four-way stop the first to reach the junction is allowed to go first.

"These are all situations which do not exist in this form in Germany," explains Axel Gern, head of Autonomous Driving at 5403 Mercedes-Benz Research and Development North America (MBRDNA). "So we need to teach our research vehicles these situations here in the USA." In future, these vehicles will be tested on the road almost every day. As in the test drives in Germany, these research vehicles from Mercedes-Benz in the USA are also current models belonging to the S- and E-Class.

Professor Thomas Weber, member of the board of management of Daimler responsible for Group Research and Mercedes-Benz Cars Development, says: "Through our new research activities we aim to promote the topic specifically in the USA, as the traffic system in the USA differs from the system in Germany in numerous aspects. The knowledge that Mercedes-Benz gains will help to achieve significant strides in the further technological development of autonomous driving,"

The autonomous cars are driven by specially trained test drivers. The cars are specially equipped with safety features; the driver must recognise clearly when the car is in autonomous driving mode and must be able to override this mode at any time; in addition, the car must be capable of stopping autonomously at any time.

"In Germany, we demonstrated in the Bertha-Benz drive back in August 2013 that autonomous driving is technically possible in complex urban and rural traffic," observes Thomas Weber. "With the test drives in California we are now broadening the horizon for our research vehicles by additionally teaching them American traffic regulations."
Location Based Systems

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Pollution has more than one solution
    April 7, 2014
    Professor Alexander Baklanov of the World Meteorological Organization talks to Colin Sowman about the difficulties of reducing urban pollution. The inhabitants of Beijing have recently been suffering pollution levels 20 times the World Health Organisation’s recommended limit while the European Union is revitalising its efforts to implement and enforce air quality standards. Almost inevitably much of the clean-up efforts are likely to focus on traffic planners and engineers.
    Read More
  • European ecoDriver project reports results
    March 17, 2016
    After over four years of work, the European ecoDriver project has released its first results. The project trials involved 170 drivers in seven countries, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and UK, both in controlled and naturalistic environments testing nine different eco-driving support systems. Despite minor variations in terms of percentage, the findings showed that overall, across all the systems, reductions in fuel consumption and CO2 have an average of 4.2 per cent with the highest
    Read More
  • Øresund bridges the front line for border crossing traffic
    September 15, 2016
    Timothy Compston considers the challenges faced by the operators of the Øresund Bridge between Denmark and Sweden, the largest structure of its kind across Europe. In light of the concerns about the ongoing security threat and the unprecedented flow of migrants, many of the countries that make up the Schengen Area in Europe have re-introduced border controls. For its part, Sweden has rolled out ID checks for train, bus and ferry passengers from Denmark placing the landmark Øresund Bridge very much on the fr
    Read More
  • Flexibility, interoperability is key to future traffic management
    February 3, 2012
    Jon Taylor of Faber Maunsell and Tabatha Bailey of Transport for London describe how an unusual mix of traffic practitioners, researchers and industry are working together to build new tools for the future. As we face higher expectations for managing congestion from both citizens and politicians, and as more and more data is becoming available from new sources, our traffic management challenge is changing.
    Read More

Highlighted Content