On December 13, the Financial Associated Press reported that The "conditional autonomous driving" system of Mercedes-Benz L3 level passed the technical regulation approval of the German Federal Motor Vehicle Administration (KBA), becoming the first car company in the world to obtain the UN-R157 certification. This means that Mercedes-Benz cars equipped with L3 self-driving technology will be able to hit the road and even be sold in the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, Australia and other countries and regions.
At present, the classification of autonomous driving is mainly in accordance with the sae standards of the American Society of Motor Vehicle Engineers, which divides autonomous driving technology from L0 to L5 into 6 levels. Of course, other countries and institutions have also introduced relevant automatic driving level classifications, but they are basically similar to the SAE automatic driving classification standards, such as the recommended national standard announcement of "Automobile Driving Automation Classification" issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China on March 9, 2020.
The biggest difference between L3 level automatic driving and L2 level automatic driving is that the definition of "assist" is canceled, which can truly free the driver's hands. After the automatic driving is turned on, the system will completely take over the driving in the limited scenario, and the acceleration, deceleration, lane change, turning and other operations that the car needs to perform during the driving process, and the driver's hands and feet are useless.
Since L3 is at the watershed of human and machine-led driving, it is in a very awkward position. You know, anyone is very important to their own life safety, and the degree of intelligence of L3 level automatic driving is to let consumers entrust their lives to high-speed machines, which requires L3 level automatic driving to have absolutely safe performance in limited scenarios.
The competition in the future automotive industry depends largely on the competition of autonomous driving technology, driving highways and other sections of the road is very boring, most users will like the automatic driving function. Even users who like to drive their own cars will want to be lazy sometimes, let the car drive itself, and autonomous vehicles will inevitably become the mainstream of the future. Xiao Lei needs to remind that before the vehicle's autonomous driving level reaches L5, users need to hold the steering wheel as much as possible and take responsibility for their own and passengers' lives.
Mercedes-Benz in the electrification, intelligence is relatively fast, coupled with Mercedes-Benz's original appearance, interior design capabilities, Mercedes-Benz will maintain a certain lead at this stage. But automatic driving is a long-distance run, it takes many years to achieve full automatic driving at the L5 level, and other car companies still have a great possibility of catching up.