Jochen Haab is confident his team's car could beat Lewis Hamilton at this weekend's Melbourne Formula One Grand Prix.
What is more there would be nobody behind the wheel.
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"Yes, of course we can," says Haab, the head of Mercedes-Benz's autonomous driving program.
"Formula One is easy."
Just don't ask him to get one of his cars to negotiate one of Melbourne's infamous hook turns.
"I encountered one of those for the first time on this trip," he says.
"I am very proud of myself for getting around unharmed. The thing about the variables in a hook turn from a [computer] coding and sensor standpoint. You need the car to go left and stop at a line, wait for a light, give way to trams, to cars, to bicycles, to pedestrians, and then complete a right turn before oncoming traffic. For a programmer, this is very difficult. There are so many random variables."
Global test
Haab will be attending his very first grand prix this year while in Melbourne, but it's not the race that brings the German technology and engineering guru to Australia.
![Jochen Haab, global head of engineering and development Mercedes Benz.](/web/20170325115336im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/v/5/q/6/k/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gv5qhj.png/1490337330939.jpg)
This country has been selected to be part of Mercedes-Benz's global testing program for its latest autonomous driving systems. The data gathered in Australia in coming months will be used to develop the latest S-Class luxury sedan, which will be released later in the year.
"What we are doing in Australia now is gathering information to feed into driver assistance systems, to make the car safer, to make our cars able to avoid situations, whether it be missing a pedestrian who steps out in front of you, or negotiating a dangerous road," Haab says.
"It part of an evolutionary path for the vehicle."
Haab is also the man entrusted to think about the revolution of the motor vehicle, and data collected in Australia will be fed into a project to develop a car that can drive itself.
We are working towards a car that, in the right conditions, in daily commute, you can hit a switch and it will drive for you.
Jochen Haab
"That is the revolutionary path," he says.
"We are working towards a car that, in the right conditions, in daily commute, you can hit a switch and it will drive for you. It will follow the flow of traffic, stop at lights, keep the speed limit, avoid situations. That's not the fun part of driving. You could do better things with your time. So we are working towards a car where you can push a button and it will just swim with the swarm, while you do your emails."
Sleep commuting
Haab says a car that will come along and pick you up, and "let you sleep on the way to work" is still further away. "That path is some way down the track, more than a decade. There is just so much development, and so much legislative and cultural change for us to achieve first."
In the meantime, Haab says his team will focus on the small road bumps on the way, such as hook turns.
"It shows you some of the challenges we have with autonomous driving. That [hook turn] is something we could have done millions of kilometres of testing around the world and not encountered. To use a joke, it wasn't on our radar. It's just one of the variables we encounter. Mainly they relate to drivers. The moods of drivers, the abilities of drivers, these are variables that are hard to gather information for," he says.
In the meantime, Haab will attend the grand prix on Sunday, confident his car could beat Lewis Hamilton.
"Formula One is easy," he says.
"You could program the course, you could program the ideal speeds and cornering. You could factor in adjustments for temperature, friction of the tyres on the road, and make adjustments for any parameters. It's just code in the end. And it's code that doesn't to do a lot or, or encounter a lot in terms of variables. There are not many 'ifs' in a Formula One. There have been races of such cars to my knowledge in racetracks in Germany. That would be easy, but I don't know what the point would be. It would come down to who hits the button first when the light goes green, and the race is over."
Some would suggest that's a pretty apt description of Formula One.
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