Uwe, what are some of the main challenges
that you're seeing
with autonomous or highly automated driving today?
The challenge we see there
is not only a technological challenge
about developing such an AD system,
it's also a challenge about society acceptance,
society about general trends,
about customer behavior.
How will customers accept it?
How will customers interpret,
how will customers interfere with AD technology?
So there are many questions besides the technological questions and aspects.
We have one thing which is also important is about the data.
We have gigabytes per second of data,
this is something we are new to handle such big amount of data
for developing an automotive system.
Uwe, to master these AD challenges,
what are some of the most important pillars that you need to be focusing on?
I think the most important pillars and competencies we normally have and must have
for mastering AD system technology development
is system engineering
coming from a very
solid and stable AD system architecture
means defining
and development process.
Another is about integrating the software
and bringing software together very efficient,
very fast to have short development cycles.
Uwe, you've been in the automotive industry for so many years.
Could you share with us some of the key learnings
that you have based on your experience in the space?
The complexity has increased tremendously over the last years,
so therefore collaboration, communication
in developing such complex systems
becomes much more important than it was about 20 years ago.
The second thing is,
the systems are tackling open-world problems,
especially on the AD system side.
So the final playbook is not written down.
So we have to be agile.
We have to be aggressive in changing, we have to
"stay foolish, stay hungry."
We have to be always able to change,
adapt our development process and also our development assets which we have.
It's amazing, because you're having to deal with all the innovation,
but on the other side you're dealing with an ecosystem
that is changing so rapidly
and you have to be prepared to make those quick moves
to keep the pace of innovation.
There's a tremendous unlimited number of scenes you have to cover,
so you must have an open space in your development process
and your product in order
to incorporate new ideas
and new scenes and new requirements,
and develop new functionalities and adding that to your system.
Uwe, where do you see the future of autonomous drive heading?
The future of autonomous is diverse.
I mean, we have on one hand side inner city use,
but we also have long distance usage.
We having sharing use
but we do also have exclusive use.
More differentiation will come in the future,
which we are not foreseeing maybe in the moment.
So once this technology will become available
I think there will be much more application and usage you will see in the future.
Uwe, if you had three wishes for autonomous development,
what would those wishes be?
This is a very easy question to answer.
We would like to have
a convenient and clear infrastructure for road and traffic in channel.
We would like to have a halfway decent cell coverage
all over where we are driving.
And to have a harmonized, global, worldwide legislation which allows us
to enter with our autonomous driving system the markets worldwide.
Uwe, it's been a real pleasure talking with you today
and thank you for sharing your own personal experiences
as well as the innovations that Daimler is driving in the autonomous space.