How Mercedes sees into the future

Mercedes' crystal ball is named Alexander Mankowsky.

At 56, he's dressed for CES in khaki trousers and a leather vest, with thin glasses perched on a round face; his frizzy white hair resembles what Einstein's would if he were caught in a wind tunnel. He might be a long-distant uncle, or he might be Doc Brown, fresh from the DeLorean. In a room of literal and figurative suits, Mankowsky commands a certain kind of gravitas.

Mankowsky has served Mercedes since 1987. His title? Well, he can't put a finger on that exactly.

"Future studies," he said, matter-of-factly, smiling. "Director, sure," he elaborated, "director of future studies." (A perfectly valid business card title, though he was all out of cards.) It has been his job to think of how the future is going to shape up, especially regarding transportation, specifically cars, and most importantly, how it will affect Mercedes-Benz.

Given the amount of progress we've seen over the past 25 years, the job entails much more than just daydreaming.

Mercedes-Benz
Alexander Mankowsky, Futurologist & Trend Researcher, Daimler AG.

Mankowsky has a theory for the future that he calls "disruptive innovation." Essentially it predicts that when something is invented, it will take 40 years to fully impact society. Take the car as we know it today, the one invented by his company's founder Karl Benz in 1886. By 1926, it had become nearly ubiquitous, reshaped the way we move about, spurred new laws, and entered popular culture. Or the airplane: As Mankowsky pointed out, by 1943, 40 years after the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, we were using it to drop bombs on each other.

It is a theory of complete change, on a societal level -- one that goes beyond Mercedes-Benz, or cars in general; one that changes the way we do business and live our lives, striking at the heart of the cities in which we live and work and thrive and will remain so in the future.

Autonomous driving, Mankowsky predicts, is a disruptive innovation. It will become the most dramatic change yet to the 100-plus-year-old automotive status quo; it will disrupt the snarl of literal human-driven traffic for the environmental and societal efficiency of autonomy. The technology is there, the various components have already been brought into place. Our cars can already steer themselves, read the lanes, tailgate in traffic -- our cars know where they're going and just how to get there. Our cars can already drive themselves at a more-than-rudimentary level.

And yet, Mankowsky might have said the same thing nearly 25 years ago when he graduated in 1984 with a degree in social sciences from the Free University of Berlin, a school known for its research in the humanities. He might have latched onto autonomous cars right then and there, paving the way for his career at Mercedes. Because 25 years ago, Mercedes was among the companies at the forefront of autonomous driving.

Mercedes-Benz
PROMETHEUS used the W140-generation S-Class for its autonomous driving project.

The project was called Eureka PROMETHEUS, the largest autonomous driving program ever launched. The European Union funded it to the tune of $1 billion. Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar, Peugeot, and BMW worked closely with the Bundeswehr University Munich. Research started in 1987, but the first autonomous cars hit the pavement in 1994 in the form of two Benz S-classes; on their own, they drove from Munich to Copenhagen, then back -- a journey of nearly 1,000 miles.

Saccadic computer vision allowed the cars to scan the road and react to real-time traffic patterns; the cars were even able to pass slower-moving traffic. A year later, the cars reached more than 100 mph on autobahns, with virtually no human interaction. The program concluded in 1995, but Mercedes continued research. Three years later, it launched adaptive cruise control -- Distronic Plus -- as a result of the project's findings. (One of the W140 S-classes is on display in the Deutsches Museum in Munich, old computers dumped wantonly in the backseat.)

More recently, Mercedes re-created with an autonomous S500 the first long-distance automobile journey, Mannheim to Pforzheim. Bertha Benz, wife of a Patent Motorwagen inventor Karl Benz, undertook the journey 125 years ago. She didn't tell Karl she had left with his invention until she got to her destination.

Blake Z. Rong
Twenty-five years later, another S-Class becomes the autonomous testbed of choice.

Ten years. That's the timeframe Mankowsky gives for autonomous car engineering and design to finally mesh with society: "If you don't have these ecosystems of inventions," he said, "then it won't work."

First, said Mankowsky, will come the speeches. The public must know about autonomous driving and how they can benefit from it. Then, as soon as next year, city planners will need to collaborate with companies like Mercedes-Benz, Audi and Google to implement "quality-of-life changes" for taking advantage of autonomous cars. "Machine-readable beacons," he gave as an example, to help cars avoid obstacles like construction zones. Audi's key component at last year's CES was an autonomous car navigating through a parking garage, through the use of similar sensors. Place enough around a city, and a driverless car could potentially navigate without issue.

If this future of autonomous cars strikes you as too cold, too alien, too unromantic for the enthusiast worldview of cars, it won't be reassuring that one of Mankowsky's favorite movies is "Minority Report" -- or that Ray Kurzweil's theories on singularity and the mind intertwining with machine are of particular interest. Both "Star Wars" and "-Trek" round out Mankowsky's pop culture tastes -- a futurist who bridges the fandom divide.

Mankowsky cites among his influences three midcentury architects and designers who shaped the modern world: Robert Moses, the "master builder" of New York City who wielded incredible power and transformed city design. Norman Bel Geddes, who designed GM's Futurama and foreshadowed the Eisenhower Interstate System by claiming, "There should be no more reason for a motorist who is passing through a city to slow down than there is for an airplane which is passing over it." The influential Swiss architect Sigfried Geideon, whose book "Mechanization Takes Command" explored the history and philosophical impact of mechanical automation. (Temporarily forgetting the title, Mankowsky wrote this in a notebook as "domination of the machine.") Once, he met one of the men who had planned Shanghai, part of the team who had carved out the skyline of Pudong from nothing but farmland. Of the rise of both New York and Shanghai, he had told Mankowsky, "There's no difference but high-speed trains."

The converging philosophies of these visionaries did come true, unfolding in a world of increasing automation and domineering automobiles in traffic-choked cities. The razing of cities to make way for Germany's post-war motorways, Mankowsky said, was like the "second destruction" of Germany. In this sense, the "disruption" he discusses is a positive.

A Mercedes engineer we spoke to believed that as much as he believed in his work and the company's progress since PROMETHEUS, autonomous driving was still 10 years away. The test that replicated Bertha Benz's famous journey went through idyllic countryside and quaint, postcard-ready towns. But the real test, he said, is on the autobahn -- and the real test is through the crowded city centers whose planners, like those in Hamburg, are already planning to throw out the cars.

Without a society that will accept and embrace this technology, it'll just remain technology, naked and ineffective -- technology that won't impact society, technology that won't disrupt. When the autonomous cars come, so too will the cities have to adapt.

"If you have the disruption," Mankowsky said, "the whole world will change. We can't do anything against it. It'll be a movement. We try to align our time with inventions."

By Blake Z. Rong