Features
9 jan 19

Mercedes showcases inner-city mobility vision with Vision URBANETIC

At CES2019 in Las Vegas, car manufacturer Mercedes-Benz showed its Vision URBANETIC, a concept that translates the vision on seamless passenger and goods mobility and that perfectly fits into Mercedes’ CASE strategy – CASE standing for Connected, Autonomous, Shared and Electric. Just ooking at it, you want to take seat and experience it, and you can immediately imagine the new way of transport for school children or corporate employee shuttles. "Thanks, but it’s a concept, it’s a vision. Don’t expect it to be commercialised within the upcoming five years," said a product manager for Vision URBANETIC at CES2019.

Vision URBANETIC was developed by the Mercedes-Benz Vans division and the result is a concept that could enable sustainable, shared and efficient transport of both people and goods. The concept is based on an autonomously driven, electrically powered chassis, which can carry structures for passenger or goods transport, that are transmitted digitally. Using camera and sensor systems, the concept perceives its surroundings in their entirety and communicates with it.

It’s a testcase for intelligent inner-city mobility as an add on for other existing mobility modes and public transport and not to replace them. But of course with Vision URBANETIC more people and goods could be transported with fewer vehicles.

Current challenges to commercialise this interesting concept are: legislation and safety, the lack of infrastructure, the acceptation for autonomous mobility and the commercial viability of the product. Nevertheless this brave and forward looking vision merits further development. What do you think?

Authored by: Steven Schoefs