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. At the show, Qualcomm announced a partnership with Google to install a so-called automotive AI agent powered by Google’s Gemini AI onto a combination of the car’s chip and the cloud. “The first AI device is not going to be the cell phone; the first AI device is going to be the car,” Amon said. This makes sense, even to AI sceptics. It’s trickier to interrogate a smartphone when out and about, because you need to type or be comfortable with voicing your questions in earshot of people around you. The car is a more protected environment. Speaking your commands is also a much better way of interacting with a computer when you’re concentrating on the road ahead at the same time. Trusting that you will get a sensible answer is key, because once that happens, you can asking your car not just about that landmark you passed or which restaurant to visit but also questioning its decision-making as we move into higher levels of autonomy. “When you start having confidence, you will ask your machine to explain itself – 'why didn't you stop?' or 'why did you not accelerate or change lanes?,” Audi technical development chief Geoffrey Bouquot said at the same Volkswagen Group event. “And then the system should instantly explain to you 'well, because I saw a red truck just behind me driving at 140kph and it was not the right moment for me to change lanes'.” You might also be able to report a glitch, Johann Jungwirth, head of autonomous vehicles at ADAS specialist Mobileye, told Autocar. “The car collects the data from all your ECUs and reports it to the manufacturer and the right developer, and they can actually fix it and push a software update into all the vehicles in the fleet. This is a huge power of customer satisfaction.” Of course, the Europeans are being pushed by the Chinese, whose car companies use computing power, software abilities and general digital smartness as a hook for customers much more than horsepower or handling. For example, Xpeng boasted at the Munich show that its new P7 electric saloon used its new Turing AI chips with a combined computing power of 2250 TOPS – three times that of the GLC EQ. While companies like Mercedes and BMW are hoping their newly digital-capable cars like the GLC EQ and iX3 will compete strongly in China, they need traction in Europe too. “This technology is less important in Europe than China, primarily due to the fact that the average age of Chinese car buyers is around 20 years below the average European who can actually afford one of these cars,” Matthias Schmidt, an independent automotive analyst, told Autocar. At least those European buyers will remember the original KITT, even if they wouldn’t put up with its sass. "Please do not refer to me as a 'car' or a 'set of wheels’, Michael: it's most demeaning,” it chastised Hasselhoff at one point in the original series. “I'm the Knight Industries Two Thousand."

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

Cars are becoming as complex as the human brain, and artificial intelligence can take them to another level

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

Cars are becoming as complex as the human brain, and artificial intelligence can take them to another level

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