Driving the Mercedes Vision AVTR Concept, a Car Straight Out of 2154

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That's how you get the Vision AVTR, a car with a feature set that reads like it's been ripped from Cameron's dream journal. Mercedes Chief Designer Gorden Wagener says the design brief was to make a car that looks like it could fit in on Pandora, and I'd say they've accomplished that. Its huge, light-streaked balloon tires (which are actually traditionally-shaped tires with a giant cap and 945 LEDs on them); the arcing roofline and huge glass doors; and the array of scale-like panels that flutter and twitch on carbon fiber "origami" legs in response to stimuli make the AVTR feel not of this planet. There are no traditional controls inside, just a giant screen and a palm-sized joystick controller in the center console that Mercedes people keep calling the "jellyfish." Just about the only thing that does feel familiar is the front end, which Wagener points out previewed the production EQS sedan's face when the Vision AVTR was first shown at CES 2020.

The sustainability goal is expressed through the heavy use of recycled or recyclable materials inside and out, including a graphene-based 110 kWh battery that Mercedes claims is compostable. Otherwise, the whole effort is about making a car that feels like a living, breathing companion, one that can recognize and react to your presence and the surrounding environment via an array of sensors and scanners.

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Without traditional buttons or screens in the cabin, the Vision AVTR's infotainment relies on two key advancements—controlling it with gestures, and controlling it with your mind. The gesture function actually works. Sitting in the seat, if you raise your hand up with your palm facing you, a menu will suddenly appear on it (beamed down from a projector in the ceiling), and you can manipulate it with a series of hand movements. This feels like the future. And back at the 2021 Munich auto show, Mercedes actually hooked up a rudimentary brainwave scanning system to the car and—after an individualized calibration process for each demo—was able to show that it's at least technically possible for an infotainment system to respond to your thoughts.

The Vision AVTR was also the first place Mercedes previewed its Hyperscreen infotainment setup now found in its production EQS vehicles, though here it's a single, uninterrupted display area with bigger dreams of projecting realtime images of its surroundings into the cabin for an "invisible wall" effect. It's also got a quad-motor AWD setup (billed as "near-wheel," not actual hub motors), the likes of which will make it to the upcoming production electric G-Wagen.

Ridiculous, or Visionary?
Again, the meat of the Vision AVTR—a brain-machine interface that turns your vehicle into a biomechanical extension of you—is still just that, a vision. The neural link startup sequence that sweeps across the cabin when you place your hand on the controller is a nifty animation triggered by an array of positional sensors, cameras, and projectors in the ceiling. But it's not actually sensing your breathing and heartbeat, though an engineer told me that's a software limitation, not a hardware one. The organic pulsing of the so-called "jellyfish" controller is a bunch of servos doing their thing. The array of reptilian scales pouring down the back run randomized sequences and can be controlled with an app; I watched one Mercedes employee spin his finger on a tablet as the little panels dutifully followed. The single-display hyperscreen is in fact a projection because it's not possible to make a screen curve the way Mercedes wants to yet.