Mercedes’ Vision Zero’ targets accident-free driving
By Ibidunni Banjoko
In a bid to curb accidents involving a Mercedes vehicle, Mercedes-Benz, the luxury carmaker, has announced the ‘Vision Zero’ project to achieve accident-free driving by 2050, said a senior executive of the German automobile giant.
The project is based on research on road accidents that the luxury carmaker has been doing for more than 50 years, and which has been, in recent years, expanded to include countries like China and India.
To achieve the said goal, Mercedes-Benz has set smaller targets such as bringing down the number of deaths and injuries due to road accidents in the next 8 years by at least half of the corresponding figure in 2020.
Also, as part of the research, the Accident Research Unit (ARU) at Mercedes-Benz analyzed and reconstructed more than 5,000 real-world accidents since the company was founded in 1969.
Commenting on this initiative, Paul Dick, the Stuttgart-headquartered company’s Head of Vehicle Safety, said: “We are pursuing our vision of accident-free driving. In other words, no more accidents involving a Mercedes vehicles. We are working towards this goal at full speed. Highly automated and autonomous driving will be a decisive contributor to the mission’s success,”
In 1997, the carmaker’s A-Class (W 168 series) failed a moose test, under which the ability of a car to evade an obstacle that suddenly appeared before it, is tested. The failure prompted Mercedes-Benz to introduce the Electronic Stability Programme (ESP) in all its models.
It would be recalled that Mercedes-Benz is partnering with self-driving sensor maker Luminar Technologies Inc. to enable fully automated driving on highways for its next-generation vehicles. The partnership is to accelerate the development of future highly automated driving technologies for Mercedes’s passenger cars.
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