Mercedez-Benz Design Chief Gorden Wagener Says That Car Owners Still Have Option To Drive Autonomous Cars

Towards the end of 2016, Gorden Wagener, the design chief at Mercedes-Benz ,already had an idea on how the future of car designs is trending into. He expressed his views in a revealing interview last December, 2016.  

"Every car is finished up to 2020 and then we have platforms that go up to 2035 or so," Gorden Wagener told the Verge in the interview "As creative people we can imagine what the future can be and we can drive it. You see how the complexity of design and the details of digitization have increased in the last 10 years."

Wagener believes that the demand of customers mostly determines the type of technology that the car designers will build in the coming years. One of the technologies that put pressure on car designers is the self-drive mechanism that most people are interested in.

Mercedes - Benz is aware of the trend and is continuously participating in the development of self-driving technology. Last year, the company introduced its FO 15 concept at the CES and emphasized the need for safety in autonomous car driving technology.

Mercedes-Benz has made it a point that their tradition of their brand as a beautiful car is always upheld. They have 700 car designers reporting to Wagener who says that the autonomous car technology development is expected to be gradual.

Wagener took over as chief designer in 2008 and has gradually developed a brand strategy moving from the traditional into the modern luxury design which forms the basis of the current and future car designs. "We applied them to everything: exterior, interior, color and trim, and to traditional design as well." he said, "There's a strict book of rules of what they can do in Mercedes user interface (UI) design." The projected Mercedes designs in 2014 has been gradually turning into today's reality.

As part of the plan in developing autonomous driving technology, the company has made sure that the option of the driver being able to control the vehicle at anytime will always be present. Of course, the customer's comfort and the unfailing performance of the car are all taken into consideration when developing car designs.