Gadgetory

this is the future this is absolutely the future we are living it here on a retired airstrip outside San Francisco California with two geese taking in the scenery right outside watching a silver bullet drive by we're at formal Naval Air Station Alameda and the reason we're here today is because I'm going to be taking a look at the Mercedes f015 luxury in motion now this is the vehicle that debuted at CES a few weeks ago to a huge reaction for a couple of reasons one its self-driving - it really does look like it's from the future it looks like nothing that we've ever seen before we're actually gonna have a chance to drive it today and hopefully we don't die it's not a street-legal car that's why we're out here in this place so let's hope everything goes according to plan almost everything about the EPS r15 is designed with autonomous driving in mind from the outside you can barely tell there are windows for passengers to see out of it all they're there but a metallic coating makes it look like uninterrupted flowing metal from top to bottom a prominent hump on the roof contains high-precision GPS equipment which isn't something you see on an everyday car oh and there are lasers in the front and it talks to pedestrians nearby you know totally normal stuff we're about to get in if I die but my family I died doing what I love I guess so I'm sitting in the driver's seat of the f015 here and you'll notice that I'm facing backwards I'm not facing toward the windshield which is one of the cooler features of a self-driving car you don't have to be looking forward and we're surrounded by LCDs these are actually touch screens you can do a variety of different things you can you can change the speed that you're going you can control music you can call people and you can change the background here to whatever you want you can be a 360-degree photo you can rotate that photo around there's a retractable table in here that can serve all four passengers and they can play games so that as you're driving you're just sort of like having fun and the cars rolling right now by the way we didn't have anything to do with that the car just started moving on its own the steering wheel is literally behind me behind my seat nobody is touching it we're just we're just rolling and and you'll you'll see the images on the displays and the doors are kind of moving along but they have nothing to do with the scenery outside it's just whatever you want it to be you can experience some other environment it's very very sci-fi and every sense of the word the legislation doesn't exist to actually allow any of this right now but Mercedes is looking at this as a vision of 2030 they're calling it a research vehicle not a concept vehicle a lot of the stuff that's happening in here they're testing in the hopes that eventually the legislation will catch up and by the time 2030 rolls around maybe we'll see cars that actually look like this on the road I don't know whether I'd personally own something like this but I think it's too soon to say maybe it's a generational leap maybe our kids will be driving vehicles that look and work like this maybe they're not for us but the fact that they're actually working they're not just concepts they're working they're driving on deserted air strips is pretty amazing