Mercedes-Benz Avatar car first look
Hi everybody, thisis Sean from The Verge and I am standing here infront of what's probably going to be the most ridiculousthing we see here all week at the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show, which is a Mercedes-Benz concept car inspired by the 2009 film, andsoon to be franchise, Avatar. Honestly, there's a lot, I don't really know whereto start with this car. It is a concept car first and foremost which means that this thing is not gonna be on the road anytime soon and it's really meant to be a showcase for a lot of different technologies that Mercedes-Benz has spent some of the last couple of years working on. Whether that's autonomousvehicle technology, electric vehicle technology or human-machine interface interaction, user experience inside thecockpit kind of technology. But first I think weshould just talk about the look of the thing. There are 33 bionic flaps or scales goingall the way up the rear end of the car that move up and down and Mercedes-Benz say theycould potentially be used as a way of communicatingwith maybe other vehicles on the road, pedestrians whoare crossing around the car. One of the other really wildthings about this car is that it has these sort of spherical wheels that can move in multipledifferent directions.
They enable the car to move notonly sideways, but diagonal. We had a little bit of a taste of that when the car rolledout here on stage tonight. The wheels on the carwhere supposedly inspired by the seeds from the bigtree in the movie, Avatar, and that's not the only thing. There are a lot of othertouches on this car that are supposedly drawinginspiration from the film and, in fact, it wasn't justinspiration, Mercedes-Benz went and worked with some ofthe people behind Avatar. Like pretty much every other automaker on the planet right now, Mercedes-Benz and its parent company, Daimler,have laid out pretty big, ambitious goals for reducingtheir carbon footprint over the next 20 or so years and so that's really where I think the inspirationactually came from for this car. The company wanted to presenta concept that was going to reflect how they arethinking about these green, sustainable technologies and so they decided to make this car, which is an electric conceptcar, it has, you know, sort of, vegan leather on the inside, it has recycled plastics usedon the interior materials and I think as they startedto work up some of those ideas and cohere them into a concept car there must've been some partnership struct with the people behindAvatar and their themes that run through that movieand the upcoming movies about, sort of, protecting thenatural resources around you. Apparently melded wellenough for them to design an entire Avatar car.
The Ava-car, if you will. And I will. The inside of the car isanother really, kind of, wild looking piece of tech which is this control unit which comes up out of the center console. Sort of, accordions up to meet your hand and according to Mercedes-Benz, it will vibrate a long withyour heartbeat and breathing. And I got to try the tech earlier today, it's still very concept version, it's not actually really working, like, it wasn't really actuallymimicking my breathing but the thing did comeout of the center console. It was, sort of, vibrating a little bit, the seats were vibratingtoo and then that's supposed to be something that you could use to, kind of, control the car. It's really the only way youcan interact with this car because there are no buttons,there's no steering wheel. There's just one giant display that stretches up from the center console and into the windshield. If anything, this is, kind of, like the ultimate ConsumerElectronic Show concept car and that's what it hits. Pretty much all of the beats that we typically see automakers pick at. We have futuristic tech that doesn't really actually work today that may work someday in the future. We have outrageous designwith lights coming out of the wheels and scaleson the back of the car and we have really ambitious goals and ambitious claimsabout what this car's going to mean for the companythat are really hard to check right now in the present. And to top that all off, we have a partnership withan entertainment company and a massive piece of IP that people are really familiar with. Puts all of those thingstogether in the one package that is admittedly pretty radical and I certainly wouldn't mind a drive, but it's definitely themost ridiculous thing we're gonna see this week.
They enable the car to move notonly sideways, but diagonal. We had a little bit of a taste of that when the car rolledout here on stage tonight. The wheels on the carwhere supposedly inspired by the seeds from the bigtree in the movie, Avatar, and that's not the only thing. There are a lot of othertouches on this car that are supposedly drawinginspiration from the film and, in fact, it wasn't justinspiration, Mercedes-Benz went and worked with some ofthe people behind Avatar. Like pretty much every other automaker on the planet right now, Mercedes-Benz and its parent company, Daimler,have laid out pretty big, ambitious goals for reducingtheir carbon footprint over the next 20 or so years and so that's really where I think the inspirationactually came from for this car. The company wanted to presenta concept that was going to reflect how they arethinking about these green, sustainable technologies and so they decided to make this car, which is an electric conceptcar, it has, you know, sort of, vegan leather on the inside, it has recycled plastics usedon the interior materials and I think as they startedto work up some of those ideas and cohere them into a concept car there must've been some partnership struct with the people behindAvatar and their themes that run through that movieand the upcoming movies about, sort of, protecting thenatural resources around you. Apparently melded wellenough for them to design an entire Avatar car.
The Ava-car, if you will. And I will. The inside of the car isanother really, kind of, wild looking piece of tech which is this control unit which comes up out of the center console. Sort of, accordions up to meet your hand and according to Mercedes-Benz, it will vibrate a long withyour heartbeat and breathing. And I got to try the tech earlier today, it's still very concept version, it's not actually really working, like, it wasn't really actuallymimicking my breathing but the thing did comeout of the center console. It was, sort of, vibrating a little bit, the seats were vibratingtoo and then that's supposed to be something that you could use to, kind of, control the car. It's really the only way youcan interact with this car because there are no buttons,there's no steering wheel. There's just one giant display that stretches up from the center console and into the windshield. If anything, this is, kind of, like the ultimate ConsumerElectronic Show concept car and that's what it hits. Pretty much all of the beats that we typically see automakers pick at. We have futuristic tech that doesn't really actually work today that may work someday in the future. We have outrageous designwith lights coming out of the wheels and scaleson the back of the car and we have really ambitious goals and ambitious claimsabout what this car's going to mean for the companythat are really hard to check right now in the present. And to top that all off, we have a partnership withan entertainment company and a massive piece of IP that people are really familiar with. Puts all of those thingstogether in the one package that is admittedly pretty radical and I certainly wouldn't mind a drive, but it's definitely themost ridiculous thing we're gonna see this week.
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