Car 6

Mercedes-Benz is starting a pilot automated car ride-hailing project in San Jose, California, to progress the development of self-driving cars, writes Brian Byrne . The vehicles will be S-Class cars equipped with Bosch and M-B systems that help with self-driving. Selected people in the city will get an app which allows them to engage the service, which will shuttle between the west side of the city and its downtown area on two key streets. Though the cars will drive themselves, there will be a 'safety driver' aboard to monitor things and take over if there's an emergency situation. The city of San Jose in 2017 became the first metro area to invite private companies to carry out field tests of automated driving.

It's another small step on the long road towards ever more autonomous driving, Bosch and Daimler have won local authority approval for driverless-parking, writes Brian Byrne . It's quite limited, though. The authority is in Baden-Württemberg, and the location is the Mercedes-Benz Museum parking garage in Stuttgart. The initiative is made possible by an intelligent multi-storey car park infrastructure from Bosch in conjunction with the vehicle technology from Mercedes-Benz. A smartphone app is used to do the actual parking. It's a view of the direction that commercial parking garages are likely to be going.