This Mercedes wants to make you happy

Today at the Tokyo Auto Show, Mercedes-Benz gave us a glimpse behind the future’s velvet rope as they unveiled the Vision Tokyo. It is an electric, autonomous vehicle, about the size of a minivan, though it more resembles Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate sculpture (aka, Chicago’s "The Bean”) than a Sienna.

At first glance, the Vision is all featureless form, with a wide front windscreen and a squarish back window. Side windows are screenprinted to match the exterior panels. Turn the car on, though, and the front grill and the back window begin pulsing with light, with LED bars jumping up and down like the "equalizer” on a c. 1986 boom box.

With a touch, the entire left-hand side of the car swings up, revealing seating for five on the sort of modernist banquette that only exists in VIP lounges. None of those seats are for driving in the autonomous future, though; instead there’s only a face-to-face conversation pit surrounded by wraparound LED screens, in which passengers (somehow) interact with three-dimensional holograms of apps, maps, and entertainment.

Powering all this is Mercedes-Benz’s F-Cell plug-in hybrid, an induction-charged battery system with hydrogen back-up, giving it total range of 600 miles. A small fin on top of the vehicle contains sensors and a 360-degree camera which enable autonomous operation.

Another part of Mercedes’ Vision for the future? "Deep Machine Learning and an intelligent Predictive Engine mean that, with each journey, it becomes more and more familiar with its occupants, their likes and preferences.” That reminds us of another future, one in which sleek sliver machines become sentient and turn on their masters. But, if the Vision can pick the hottest club and spin the best tunes on the way there, then sign us up for that future, too.

(BBC)