Mercedes imagines passengers in driverless cars never interacting with the world outside

Driverless cars still aren’t ready for consumers to buy, but they’re getting closer. When they do, they will reduce dangers and hassles of driving but will not magically eliminate congestion. And it would be a shame if automation totally isolated the riders from the places they travel through, as one concept from Mercedes does.

Electric and driverless car concepts made a big splash at this month’s International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Two concepts from BMW and Mercedes show what is coming soon.

BMW hopes to make parking easier

BMW’s foray into automation, called the i3, can’t quite drive itself down a city street. But it can park. At the push of a remote, the vehicle can roll forward, without a driver.

That sort of innovation may not revolutionize cities as we know them, but it could have immediate practical impacts. A self-parking car could squeeze into tighter parking spots. That could make our parking lots more efficient, saving space and reducing drivers’ desire to circle for a better spot.

BMW hopes to continue developing the i3 until it can fully retrieve itself from a parking lot, sans driver. But manufacturers aren’t stopping there. Other features include things like adaptive cruise control, lane-departure detection, and eventually full automation.

Mercedes hopes to block out the outside world

BMW wasn’t the only car company at CES. Mercedes also made news, with its completely autonomous F015 concept car.

According to Dieter Zetsche, head of Mercedes-Benz, the F015’s futuristic design protects its driver in an exclusive “cocoon” of luxury.

With its F015 design, Mercedes strives to isolate passengers behind silvered slits of windows and extra-thick doors. Since the car drives itself, there’s no need for anyone in it to bother themselves with views of the outside world. Instead, touch screen computer panels line the doors.

Zetsche compared the car to an exclusive condo, contrasting it with a public subway car that anybody can enter. He recalled Margaret Thatcher’s infamous comment that anyone on a bus beyond age 26 “can count himself a failure.”

Techno wizardry aside, Zetsche’s comments and Mercedes’ designs are troublingly antisocial.

Many car drivers already exhibit a “windshield perspective”, where the outside of the car seems like an entirely separate, and somehow less real world. That perspective has all sorts of negative effects, from promoting road rage to encouraging snap judgments that magnify social biases.

By taking the next step and literally blocking the outside world from motorists’ eyes, Mercedes will surely exaggerate the effect. The world will be out of sight, out of mind.

Will driverless cars cure congestion?

It’s still an open question whether autonomous cars will improve congestion or worsen it. On the one hand, they’ll eliminate much human error and potentially use road space more efficiently. On the other hand, if more people use cars more often, congestion will likely get worse.

In the meantime, taxis may offer an instructive example.

Like with autonomous cars, travelers can hail taxis whenever they want, and with taxis one need not cruise around for parking. Nonetheless, outside CES at the Las Vegas convention center there was plenty of taxi congestion.

Cabs were simultaneously numerous enough to clog the streets and insufficient to serve everyone waiting for a ride. A colleague reported standing in line for 40 minutes until he could get a ride. Even queued up in a line and ready to go, cabs simply could not move fast enough to load all passengers in a timely manner.

Queuing like at the Las Vegas taxi stand isn’t a problem driverless cars will solve. They may reduce some congestion by eliminating cruising for parking or by forming platoons on the highway, but at some point, everything comes down to geometry.

Anyone who’s ever tried to catch a cab at DC’s Union Station during a busy time of day knows exactly what my colleague experienced.

Meanwhile, I walked around the corner from the convention center, waited five minutes, and took the bus.