????不要把奔馳F 015稱為“汽車”，因為我們的汽車詞典里還沒有一個專有名詞能形容它——用鋁合金精雕細琢而成，形似太空飛船的豪華座駕。F 015的“0”是為了避免與F15戰(zhàn)斗機相混淆，但僅憑這樣一個名字并不足以幫它開辟一個新的汽車類別。

????F 015具有一輛全尺寸轎車的長度，配備四個尺寸頗大的車輪，行駛過程中不需要有人操縱方向盤。它的后備箱里塞滿了全速運行的電腦。它唯一發(fā)出的聲音便是防止處理器過熱的風扇聲——當然，當電腦覺得必要的時候，它也會用像Siri一樣的聲音，向路上的行人發(fā)出警示，并用頭燈和尾燈發(fā)出一系列奔馳自行發(fā)明的動態(tài)燈光信號。

????我最近在這臺相當有美感的“未來座駕”里試乘了20分鐘，感覺就像坐上了只有一個車廂的列車的頭等艙。F 015就算出現(xiàn)在迪士尼世界里也毫無違和感——但這是奔馳花費四年之力研發(fā)的杰作，全世界獨此一部。奔馳甚至還給它買了一份高達1200萬美元的保險。

????試乘之后，我采訪了兩位最主要的研發(fā)功臣，正是他們將這樣一個未來主義的科幻概念，變成了看得見摸得著的自動駕駛汽車平臺。亞歷山大?曼可夫斯基是戴姆勒集團社會與科技部的一名未來學(xué)家，霍爾格?赫特森拉伯則是奔馳在德國一個設(shè)計部門的負責人，無人駕駛汽車項目開始后，他就開始在奔馳的東京工作室從事研發(fā)工作。

????F 015的靈感迸發(fā)于2007年。當時美國國防部的國防高級項目研究局舉辦了一個名叫“城市挑戰(zhàn)賽”的項目，曼可夫斯基作為一名社會學(xué)家，親眼見到了參賽的見習工程師們?nèi)绾谓邮芴魬?zhàn)，讓自動駕駛汽車在城市環(huán)境中行駛。

????以下是采訪實錄：

????亞歷山大?曼可夫斯基：在“城市挑戰(zhàn)賽”以前，我就在研究移動文化了。不同地區(qū)的人有不同的行為方式。他們已經(jīng)形成了一種文化。比如曼哈頓和舊金山的移動文化就不一樣。

????《財富》：你是否考慮過游牧文化？

????亞歷山大?曼可夫斯基：是的。游牧文化意味著一切都要隨身攜帶，你就是一座移動的村莊。這是非常有意思的現(xiàn)象，你在紀錄片、先鋒派電影甚至主流電影中都能看到。

????就像公路片？

????亞歷山大?曼可夫斯基：是的。公路片很重要，因為你總會面臨一種兩難選擇，一方面是自由，另一方面你必須乘車前進。公路片往往有一個不好的結(jié)局，這就是你為獲得自由而付出的代價，就像《末路狂花》和《車隊》一樣。從某種角度上說，《星際迷航》系列也是公路片，有點像是一個在星際中移動的社會主義社區(qū)。

????霍爾格?赫特森拉伯：2011年，我們邀請了東京的大城市規(guī)劃師和建筑師召開了一次研討會。我們邀請了亞歷山大以及我們自己的自動駕駛工程師。那也是我們首次擁有了一個來自全球各地，供職于公司不同部門的精英組成的智囊團。

????亞歷山大?曼可夫斯基：一個明確的目標是，讓設(shè)計師和規(guī)劃師利用三天時間，勾勒出他們所在城市未來幾十年的發(fā)展圖景。

????霍爾格?赫特森拉伯：不管他們是來自美國的工作室還是意大利的工作室，他們都必須用二維圖像勾劃出他們所在的城市，然后想象這些城市在10年或20年以后會變成什么樣子。

????亞歷山大?曼可夫斯基：這些城市的未來會用到不同的移動工具——你不能說它一定是汽車。有一個概念提到了“環(huán)型城市”，即不同的移動工具行駛在不同的路線上，它們行駛的時間也不一樣。未來的城市會有電動履帶鋪成的自動人行道，甚至可能還有移動的花園。另一個例子就是來自東京的F 015的創(chuàng)意。

????Don’t call the Mercedes F 015 a “car.” In fact, our automotive lexicon doesn’t yet have a word for the sculpted-aluminum land-bound spaceship-limousine. The name F 015, pronounced ef-oh-one-five to avoid confusion with the F15 fighter plane, doesn’t help establish a vehicular classification.

????Follow these clues. It’s the length of a full-size sedan. It has four large wheels set to its corners. It moves around without a human being behind the steering wheel. And it packs all traditional cargo spaces with an arsenal of computers running at full tilt. The whir of fans to keep processors from overheating is the only sound of its core operations—although it can communicate, when it sees a need, with pedestrians via a Siri-like voice, through laser-beamed messages on the pavement, and in swirls of animated lights displayed on its large open front and rear grilles using a symbolic language of its own invention.

????I recently had a somewhat bumpy 20-minute ride in the almost-sensuous vehicle-robot. The experience was like being in a first-class single-cabin rail car on virtual tracks. It would not have been out of place at Disneyworld—except that the F 015 is a one-off, the single product of more than four years of Mercedes research. The vehicle is insured at about $12 million.

????After my ride, I sat down with the two men most responsible for bringing the F 015 from futuristic hallucination to a tangible full-scale ride-worthy research platform for the future of autonomous mobility. Alexander Mankowsky is a futurist in Daimler’s society and technology group, and Holger Hutzenlaub, a leader of advanced design group in Germany, was based in Mercedes’s Tokyo studio when the project commenced.

????The first spark of inspiration occurred in 2007, when Mankowsky—trained as a sociologist—witnessed student engineers competing in a challenge to run a self-driving car through a city environment, at the Urban Challenge held by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a program of the U.S. Department of Defense.

????The Interview：

????Alex Mankowsky: Before the Urban Challenge, I was already working on mobility cultures. People behave differently in different regions. They develop a culture. It’s different in Manhattan than in San Francisco, and so on.

????Bradley Berman: Did you think about nomadic cultures?

????AM: Yes, sure. Nomadic cultures mean you have everything with you. You are a moving village. It’s very funny stuff, which you can see in documentary, avant-garde and mainstream movies, including science fiction.

????BB: Like the road movie genre?

????AM: Yeah, road movies are important because you always have a dilemma and conflict with the perception of freedom and moving with the car, and the rules and regulations that define a street, and the police. Road movies are always ending with a bad outcome for freedom, like Thelma and Louise and Convoy. In a way, the Star Trek stories are a road movie too, a kind of mobile Socialist community between the stars.

????Holger Hutzenlaub: In 2011, we organized a workshop with the main city planners and architects of Tokyo. We invited Alex, and our own autonomous driving engineers. It was the first time we had a think-tank situation with people from different parts of the company across the globe.

????AM: The explicit goal was, in three days, to create sketches for different future scenarios and for designers and planners to go home from Tokyo and make future scenarios for their own cities.

????HH: It didn’t matter if it was the U.S. studio or the Italian studio. They had to come up with a vision, a two-dimensional picture of his or her main city, and how it would look in 10 or 20 years ahead.

????AM: These futures used different mobility devices. You can’t say cars. One concept was the “l(fā)oop city,” with different mobility devices for different routes, in which you can drive different durations. There were moving sidewalks, and even stranger ideas like moving gardens. The F 015 is one example, the one from Tokyo.