Are buyers ready for the amazing things their new cars can do?

What David Hasselhoff depicted back in the 1980s with KITT, a sentient Pontiac Trans Am, car makers and their technology partners now believe is becoming a reality for everyone.

Smarter software, ballooning levels of computer power and the application of artificial intelligence (AI) are on the cusp of allowing drivers to create a relationship with their car that some are predicting will border on friendship.

But is the consumer really ready for that?

“That car is more like an intelligent machine, an intelligent thinking machine,” Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius recently said of the new GLC EQ. “The computing power in that vehicle is insane.” 

The EV's ‘superbrain’ computer chip can do 254 trillion operations per second (TOPS), allowing it to handle "complexity akin to the human brain", according to Mercedes.

“It's like talking to a very well-informed, super-intelligent person,” Källenius said. And like a human, it can empathise, or so Mercedes claims. “We're basically at a point where car can react to the driver's mood,” Källenius said.

The Knight Rider series that starred Hasselhoff and KITT is still a useful reference point to those in the industry for human-machine interaction.

“It wasn't a car; he was talking to his friend. His friend helped him, saved him, shot missiles, whatever it needed to happen,” Mark Granger, head of digital cockpit at Qualcomm – the chip company powering Mercedes’ ‘superbrain’ - said at the Munich motor show. “I don't think I want my car shooting missiles, but when you can actually interact with your car and it feels like your friend, to me that's the nirvana.”

Driving nirvana as imagined by Qualcomm is “probably a couple of years away”, Granger added.

The most common response is likely to be scepticism from everyone who has recently tried and failed to get their car to understand a simple vocal command, but that is changing.

The biggest step forward to improve your car’s understanding and responses is the inclusion of AI large language models 'on the edge' – meaning it's embedded into the car’s computer chip, rather than relying on a connection to the cloud. 

“You need to go where the humans are, and humans are actually on the edge,” Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon told a Volkswagen Group discussion panel at Munich.