► Markus Schäfer at CES 2024
► The Mercedes CTO talks
► His views on MBUX, AI, EVs and more
Mercedes-Benz has made a raft of tech-related announcements at CES 2024, showing off a new MBUX infotainment system with integrated AI, a collaboration with Audible and Amazon Music and a music system called MBUX Sound Drive, that reacts to how the car is being driven.
The latter was launched with many a soundbite courtesy of US musician and producer will.i.am, but we chose to sit down with Mercedes’ chief technical officer Markus Schäfer to hear a bit more about various challenges and plans the brand is facing.
Question: Where do you see the future for in-car screens? Bigger, smaller or with head-up displays replacing screens altogether?
Markus Schäfer: ‘I think we are on a trajectory where you see even more screens in the car to some extent. You will see more seamless screens. So what we call the pillar-to-pillar seamless screen that we showed in our EQXX.
‘One day, where we have really something that goes from left and right, to a pillar. Something that is a really, really stunning experience.
‘What is nice about screens is if you’re talking immersive experience in the car. Your senses should be activated by watching something. By combining this visual experience with the audio you create this immersive experience. I think the screen is a very, very essential part at least for the next couple of years.
If you look at the projections, and if you’ve come to CES for some time, you’ll see window projections. Cool, I will take that if they were useful outside of a car show or an exhibition, but they have so many downsides at the moment. Maybe for the rear-window glass, but to have projections at the front there are so many downsides. That’s why our way is working with high-quality screens.’
Q: How long will Lithium-ion batteries be around, when will we make the switch to solid state?
MS: ‘There were some very optimistic forecasts a while ago. It reminds me a little bit of the forecasting of autonomous drive and all this optimism.
‘For me, it’s a head-to-head race. Unexpectedly the conventional lithium ions have got so much better energy density. Both technologies can do it, so what is really the benefit of a solid-state battery?
‘So many people are working on the conventional batteries and so we’re making them so much better that it’s a head to head race and I don’t know who the winner is going to be.
‘So you might get the first batteries in 2025/26 but I don’t think that they come with a major cost advantage or warm energy advantage. On the safety side of course they come with this advantage. In terms of cost, that is the starting point, there are some slight improvements but nt the major improvement.’
Q: How much future do you see in the combustion engine?
MS: We will see a new combustion engine in MMA. It was developed for battery first and we will also made it available for mild hybrid. It is a highly efficient engine with a very attractive cost basis. It is Euro 7, mild hybrid and connected to a brand new transmission.
Q: Is a future smaller G-Class an MMA car?
MS: No, the car will be developed by the AMG-G group. It is electric only.
Q: Is the MMA family a smaller portfolio of vehicles?
MS: The vehicles are moving a notch up in terms of size. We will offer the customer more than what they get from the current CLA, EQA. We are moving up a bit in the segment – we are not going to the next segment, the customer will get more.
The CLA is the gateway into the brand. There will be four cars. A CLA, CLA Shooting Brake – not a station wagon – and two SUVs. We are not a volume producer, with the complexity of seven vehicles, you can imagine how small the individual amount of sales is for each of these vehicles.
These cars are not worldwide vehicles. I know they are popular – there are many fans of the A-Class, but it is not a car that China takes as the biggest market in the world. It is very difficult to build a business case.
Q: Will you maintain the gap to the C-Class?
MS: Every segment or model is moving up a notch and that is happening throughout the portfolio.
Q: What is Mercedes’ thinking on autonomous driving?
MS: ‘It is by far not over. But maybe some realities for some different competitors, who see that it’s not an easy problem to solve. Definitely too optimistic at the beginning. There’s a lot of variable cost to take a car to level three. We need the sensors in the car, the laser scanner, the LIDAR you need the cameras you need you need the radar system in the car.
‘That’s why so many companies are focusing on level two level two plus two plus plus. Our philosophy is we should have a distinction between level two and level three. Level three the car takes over, level two the driver’s in charge and you should never mix this up.
Q: AI is a dominant theme at CES 2024, has this changed the roadmap for the development of the operating system?
MS: ‘In this world, hypes are coming and going, but it’s not the case that AI was not available a year ago. It got more intense after chat GPT and there is more focus now.
‘Last year we had Chat GPT in all our cars in the US, so after CES we decided to offer all our customers a beta version of Chat GPT. We have it already, we didn’t make a big fuss about it, we were getting experience with it.’
‘We’re taking all the learnings that we have over the last nine months with Chat GPT in the car and what we have announced today is the next development of that.