Gadgetory

I'm Sean o Cain and I'm in the Mercedes Smart vision EQ and if I get scared here's a emergency cut off oh god here we go tell my family I love them I'll be back from the future at some point okay so it's day four day five of CES and it's midnight so that's why I'm having trouble figure out what day it is and we're about to head to the Las Vegas Strip because Mercedes wants to put us in the car that they think is going to be what we're all gonna be riding in in 2013 the smart vision EQ was announced late last year at the Frankfurt Motor Show and this was the first time that Mercedes has brought it to the United States it was the kind of opportunity I didn't want to pass up to see this weird futuristic idea from one of the world's biggest and oldest automakers it was pretty chaotic when we got there Mercedes had shut down a whole section of Las Vegas Boulevard had dozens of people coordinating the whole thing and a ton of tourists were trying to snap photos or yell questions about just what exactly they were seeing I should be clear this is not driving itself like it is supposed to some day there's literally a guy with a bunch of joysticks in a bag who's gonna be driving us down the strip so let's see how this goes here we go we're moving none of the stuff in here is like actually really working I mean the screen is lighting up and showing us like a demo but like I'm touching it does not doing anything it's not an actual touchscreen these are like speakers or cameras or lights or something but I can't really tell this is really just like a mock-up of what Mercedes thinks a self-driving car would be like in 2030 something that you would order on your phone and have come pick you up so that you can go out to wherever it is you want to go it's based off of the smart fortwo sit like so an actual car that's on the road today which is why it might look a little bit similar to you if you've ever seen some of those flashy or newer smart cars but obviously redesigned with a whole bunch of future Flair you know you've got these crazy blue lights these doors that scissor up and down and sound like they're in a sci-fi movie we've got lights along the floor a big screen on the front that says like Las Vegas Boulevard and like watch out and like all these things to the sort of signal the pedestrians we're obviously also not going very fast as you can see and everybody's taking pictures we're just crawling along the strip we're actually headed towards a parked truck right now all right we're stopped now we're moving backwards what's really funny is like there's this giant windshield that just like stretches from the front of the dashboard all the way to the back which is cool because like we're on the Las Vegas Strip we can see everything that's happening like there's Planet Hollywood there's the Paris like that's still Planet Holly I never knew Hollywood so big all of this the see-through design the giant screen has to do with how Mercedes thinks will one day use a fully self-driving car and while some company is imagining them as workspaces or store experiences the smart vision EQ is all about turning your car into a rolling smartphone ride with things like your favorite entertainment or social media accounts available right in the dashboard now maybe that's a good idea or not I can tell you right now though that the idea of my Twitter feeds scrolling by on the dashboard of a self-driving car is already giving me nightmares oh there's a picture of a turtle and it's got 203 likes it has more the turtle from the future has more likes than my Instagram posts so we've gone back and forth down the street a couple times now and so here's as much as I can tell you going 12 miles an hour in a remote controlled version of this car I get it like I get what Mercedes is really trying to do here you know you there's no steering wheel there's no pedals you hail the car you hop in you've got your smartphone apps connected your social media your entertainment and you don't have to worry you can just take it and enjoy the view and that all sounds great but there's so much more work to be done to get the technology the automotive technology ready to get self-driving cars to this level that by the time we get there by the time we get to 2030 so much more is gonna change that it's hard to say how close this really is to what will eventually be riding it so it's nice that Mercedes is thinking about these things it is sweet to see that they're willing to put this much work into making sure everybody knows that they're thinking about these things but for right now it's just another sort of stab in the dark what our future of moving around looks like so for more weird self-driving cars electric cars right Able's all the crazy stuff we've seen this week at CES 2018 Kodi youtube.com slash The Verge and click Subscribe and while you're at it go to the verge comm slash CES everything else we've done this week is there and so much more thanks for watching