Why The Mercedes Future Bus Isn't About The Future At All

Tesla isn't the only one poised to disrupt the auto industry--Mercedes has just released its city bus, and it's an autonomous vehicle. Aptly called the Future Bus, it is the first autonomous bus of its kind. According to Mashable, its unveiling included a 12-mile drive through the streets of Amsterdam. Its program is called City Pilot, which allows the bus to drive autonomously along certain lanes up to 43 kilometres per hour; a 'driver' is there to monitor the operation of the vehicle--at least for now while the law requires it and the technology is in beta mode. The bus can not only drive along special lanes, but also pass through tunnels, communicate with traffic systems, and break for pedestrians and obstacles. But Mercedes is not planning to implement City Pilot in the near future, or even in its 2020 release of its other autonomous vehicles, but plans to do so incrementally, such as driving to and from bus stops. 

This is a fine idea--but it's neither novel nor ground breaking. And there are myriad scenarios for the city of the future that in fact discourage the need for buses in the first place. 

As I've reported in a previous post, Elon Musk has a plan for future transit that will destroy the bus by transporting mass groups of people to their destinations and not merely to bus stops.  In fact, this Future Bus concept is so lacklustre and so reliant on outdated models of cities that its very name can be reduced to a laughable irony. To me, the Future Bus's debut in Amsterdam may be its sole purpose--to simply attempt to show that the prestigious auto manufacturer is thinking about the future, regardless of how crude. 

Elon Musk knows how to think about the future.

One of the big problems for the future of cities is the transportation of mass numbers of people within a context of large numbers of autonomous vehicles. There will be tremendous numbers of autonomous cars flooding the cities--where will they go when they've dropped off their passengers? Musk is thinking in the long-term. He claims that "We have an idea for something that is not exactly a bus, but will solve the [urban] density problem . . . . I think we need to totally rethink the idea of public transport . . . and create something that people are actually going to like a lot more." 

Musk shows us how to think about the future--to take current models, like buses for instance, and deconstruct them. Mercedes reveals a bus today that will be obsolete in two years from now, but calls it Future Bus, which to me insults our intelligence. 

In many ways, the Future Bus serves merely as a big mobile billboard for Mercedes. In the famous words of Marshall McLuhan, "The medium is the message." The Future Bus is a message to all the adoring Mercedes fans that the German auto giant is still making stuff into the (near) future--that's pretty much it. Yes it's sleek, yes it looks like a nice bus, but there's nothing futural about it. One of the highlights of the bus's interior is that people can charge their mobile devices while riding in it--real progressive stuff! In 5 years, mobile devices will most likely be obsolete, as will the Mercedes Future Bus.