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Autonomous Cars Have to Start as Taxis, Says Mercedes-Benz

Privately owned ones may come much later

At this point, you can safely assume that self-driving cars are coming. Not only are tech companies like Google and Tesla hard at work developing autonomous technology, so are established automakers like GM and Ford. But when self-driving cars eventually do go on sale, it may be a long time before you can put one in your garage.

Speaking to Automotive News, Ola Kaellenius, Daimler's head of Group Research & Mercedes-Benz Cars Development, said he thinks self-driving taxis are the only way forward. Why? Because privately owned cars would be too expensive. At least in the beginning.

"The number of sensors you have to put on the car, the computing power and so on adds tens of thousands of dollars once you get it into production," said Kaellenius. "Where do you have a business case for something like that? You have it in a robot taxi scenario, where you can take a city or a part of the city and say, 'OK, I'm going to put a hundred, 200, 300, a thousand ... into this area. '"

And by providing a taxi service instead of selling cars privately, he thinks Mercedes could actually start to make money pretty quickly.

"The amortization comes through not paying the driver. You could have a very quick amortization, so our effort on Level 4, 5 is robot taxi first. In our case the commercialization of that happens between 2020 and 2025 where we start rolling that out — either through our own mobility services that we're building up or as a partner with other mobility services," said Kaellenius.

After that, if the cost of autonomous technology comes down and consumer interest is high enough, you may see Mercedes sell self-driving cars directly to consumers. But unless Kaellenius has it wrong, it'll probably be a long time before you can buy a Mercedes that can truly drive itself.

Source: Automotive News (Subscription required)

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