Review Mercedes-Benz Vision AVTR Concept First Drive: What’s new for the 2154 model year
MANHATTAN BEACH, California – Who among us can’t imagine what it will be like to drive a car in the future? And we’re not talking about a Honda 2028 opening version or whatever, interesting as that could be. No, we’re talking decades, maybe even centuries, far beyond what we have now, where even weird concepts like round tires are reimagined. Something like a gyro from “Sword runner” or one of those light cycles from “Tron. ” Therefore color We were amazed when Mercedes-Benz actually put us behind the wheel of their Vision AVTR concept.
Mercedes Launching AVTR at CES 2020 as a tie for the upcoming movie”Avatar: Way of the Water, ” will hit theaters on December 16. The car and the motion picture share the same name, although Mercedes says that AVTR stands for Advanced Vehicle Transformation. To understand what that means, we have to dig into the fantasy world that writer/director James Cameron has created.
“Way of Water” is the sequel to 2009”Avatar,” imagines a future in which humans have exhausted most of the Earth’s natural resources. To keep civilization going in 2154, they need to mine other planets, including the Earth-like moon Pandora. Unfortunately for humans, a sentient race of blue-skinned humanoids that inhabit Pandora, prevents us from harvesting a compound literally named unobtainium. These Na’vi live in harmony with nature, hunt with bows and arrows, wear loincloths, and often wish not to be exterminated by a heavily militarized space-mining corporation.
The film was groundbreaking in its use of special effects. Cameron – out of “Titanic“”alien“ and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day“ famous – said he wanted to make the movie in the 1990s but had to wait a decade for technology to catch up. We say this just to try to explain how Pandora’s natural beauty creates a visual feast. Cameron painted a world filled with bioluminescence, lush vegetation, and breathtaking landscapes.
Mercedes designers wanted to make the AVTR look as if it belonged to this world. As a result, the car is so imbued with organic design that it makes the 1996 Ford Taurus look like a Volvo 240. From the side, its lines are as fluid and seamless as river pebbles, with no corners. edge or angled to represent the traditional three-box shape. The extremely low roofline melts into a glass bubble cabin that sits between the wheels rather than above them. Speaking of wheels, they are urethane leather spheres instead of traditional discs.
The most interesting feature of the car can be found on the back, where there are 33 bio-swing blades that open and close independently of each other. Every step on carbon fiber hinges on which the accordion resembles pieces of origami paper. Their lightness allows for extremely quick activation, and they can be programmed to blink in a wave pattern like a bird in flight. The hole honeycomb gives off a blue glow, but if you stop suddenly, the wings will fly vertically like air brake while the slits glow red. It’s an undeniably neat effect, but you probably shouldn’t stare at them for too long if you have trypophobia.
Just to be clear, the car never actually appeared in the “Avatar: Way of the Water. In the film, the machine is the enemy, the destroyer of the indigenous way of life. Also, the Na’vi civilization was pre-agricultural, and driving a car in a land without paved roads would be quite difficult.
It would be easy – expected, even – for Mercedes to stop there. Many of the show cars weren’t drivable, but it went ahead and built a practical running concept and allowed the inquisitive journalists to spin around.
Approach the vehicle and it comes to life with a series of glow animations that glow around and fade out like Pandora’s glowing flora. It was almost as if the car was breathing, a feeling amplified by the twitching of the rear doors. Glance at the illuminated user interface graphics and you’ll see where EQS and SUV EQS have their noses. LED lights scatter to the lower rack below the comet-like taillights. Even the wheels have flashing light patterns that form “spokes”. Mercedes design director Gordon Wagener said they were inspired by the wood pieces in the movie.
The scissor glass door swings open on large chrome hinges to allow access to the cabin. The highlights swirl and outline the edges of nearly every interior surface, adding to the feeling that the car is still alive. Sitting gracefully requires you to lean back in the leaf-thin seats, then swing your legs into the car.
AVTR is so low that you don’t sit as much as recline. The first thing you notice is that there is no steering wheel, no screen, no controls of any kind in front of you. The dash is simply a stretched empty curve. All movements of the car are done through the mushroom-cap joystick in the center console. Its location means that the driver or passenger can operate it.
Push the pad forward for Drive, push it backwards for Reverse. Roll left or right to turn in that direction. AVTR has rear wheel steering, so the front and rear wheels can rotate in opposite directions to tighten the turning radius. Turn the pad left or right and the wheels will rotate in the same direction to follow the diagonal of the corner. And no, the wheels don’t really rotate in three dimensions like Will Smith’s Audi in “I, robot. “The spherical shape looks cool and only the strip at the ‘equatorial’ makes contact with the ground. That’s how the lighting on the tires remains undamaged.
We were able to test these functions a short distance around the parking lot, but it’s not as intuitive as it sounds. For my brain, it’s more natural to rotate to turn and roll to walk through the corner. It was also quite difficult to turn the pad slowly while the car was in motion, as the car had almost no suspension and small bumps would have passed through my arms to accidentally jerk the controls. It’s not the technology’s fault. This is just a concept and is not designed to run at more than a few miles per hour. Also admittedly it could have been easier if I had used my dominant hand.
The absence of a steering wheel allows the entire extension of the curved dash to become a screen. An overhead projector projects a map onto the surface, and as a highlight for the movie, Pandora is one of the possible locations. Changes to the menu are made through gestures. Just raise your hand to a spot above the panel and you’ll see icons projected onto your palm. Then you swipe left or right to make selections. Like a touchscreen, it requires considerable concentration, so such a system would only be cautious when the car is on autopilot.
Because environmental consciousness is a major theme of “Avatar” movie, Mercedes said that 110-kWh the battery is organic and compostable using graphene and is free of rare earth metals. The system’s total horsepower is 469 and power comes from four motors, one for each wheel.
It’s a fascinating thought exercise to imagine how a car from the year 2154 – or perhaps more accurately, a car not born on planet Earth – might be different from current machines. like ours. The Mercedes engineers assured me that I would get used to it with more practice, but perhaps it was too big of an evolutionary step for this particular human being.
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