奔馳自動駕駛概念車背後的瘋狂創想

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.

不要把奔馳F 015稱爲“汽車”，因爲我們的汽車詞典裏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”是爲了避免與F15戰鬥機相混淆，但僅憑這樣一個名字並不足以幫它開闢一個新的汽車類別。

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.

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。它的後備箱裏塞滿了全速運行的電腦。它唯一發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，向路上的行人發出警示，並用頭燈和尾燈發出一系列奔馳自行發明的動態燈光信號。

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.

我最近在這臺相當有美感的“未來座駕”裏試乘了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就算出現在迪士尼世界裏也毫無違和感——但這是奔馳花費四年之力研發的傑作，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。

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.

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

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.

F 015的靈感迸發於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“城市挑戰賽”的項目，曼可夫斯基作爲一名社會學家，親眼見到了參賽的見習工程師們如何接受挑戰，讓自動駕駛汽車在城市環境中行駛。

The Interview：

以下是採訪實錄：

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.

亞歷山大o曼可夫斯基：在“城市挑戰賽”以前，我就在研究移動文化了。不同地區的人有不同的行爲方式。他們已經形成了一種文化。比如曼哈頓和舊金山的移動文化就不一樣。

Bradley Berman: Did you think about nomadic cultures?

《財富》：你是否考慮過遊牧文化？

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.

亞歷山大o曼可夫斯基：是的。遊牧文化意味着一切都要隨身攜帶，你就是一座移動的村莊。這是非常有意思的現象，你在紀錄片、先鋒派電影甚至主流電影中都能看到。

BB: Like the road movie genre?

就像公路片？

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.

亞歷山大o曼可夫斯基：是的。公路片很重要，因爲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局，這就是你爲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。

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.

霍爾格o赫特森拉伯：2011年，我們邀請了東京的大城市規劃師和建築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，供職於公司不同部門的精英組成的智囊團。

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.

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

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.

霍爾格o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，然後想象這些城市在10年或20年以後會變成什麼樣子。

AM: These futures used different mobility devices. You can’t say cars. One concept was the “loop 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.

亞歷山大o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的創意。

BB: Were these ideas hard to sell within the company?

這些理念是否很難說服公司內部的人？

AM: The crucial moment was 2012 during a stressful meeting of some Daimler board members, including Dieter Zetsche (the chairman, and head of Mercedes cars). The mood was not the best.

亞歷山大o曼可夫斯基：曾經有一個重要時刻，那是在2012年，戴姆勒集團的一些董事會成員召開了一次壓力很大的會議，參會人包括迪亞特o柴奇（戴姆特總裁兼奔馳公司負責人）。當時的氣氛不能算是非常好。

HH: The board wanted a show car for research, but the concept developed by a completely different team was on the table. This other concept was not convincing, so they canceled it.

霍爾格o赫特森拉伯：董事會希望搞一輛概念車用來研究，但另一個完全不同的團隊也將一個概念提到了桌面上。那個概念不夠有說服力，所以他們把它斃掉了。

AM: And then I walked in with a single very black slide with the idea of a lasso.

亞歷山大o曼可夫斯基：然後我用一個非常簡單的黑色幻燈片提出了“套索”的概念。

HH: Obviously, mom and dad are turning around from the front row to face the kids. We found this after we completed our concept.

霍爾格o赫特森拉伯：在這張圖片中，父母顯然是從前排座位上轉過身子，面對着後排座位上的孩子。我們是在完成了自己的概念後才發現這一點的。

BB: This picture brings up a criticism, that the F 015 seems like a futuristic vision from the 1950s, sort of a retro-futuristic image, rather than something specifically forward-looking.

這張圖片也帶來了一些批評，即F 015看起來更像是上世紀50年代人眼中的科幻產物，帶有復古未來主義色彩，而不是一個特別向前看的產品。

AM: I like the term retro-futurist. I believe it was a term made popular by the car designer J Mays, who designed the new Beetle. In this case, I don’t accept it because these cars from the ‘50s and ‘60s were very conservative, in terms of the social sense of a family with the father in the front. You see the same thing in Disney animations. You have the father going in this car to the office, but not walking. Instead, he takes just one step out of the car. The housewife and the children are going shopping according to the gender stereotypes of the 1950s. In our case, the vehicle is integrated with the fabric of communication between people. It’s designed more like a robot than a car. The robot-car or mobile robot in our vision can enhance how you interact.

亞歷山大o曼可夫斯基：我喜歡“復古未來主義”這個詞。我認爲這個詞是從新甲殼蟲的設計師J Mays那裏流行起來的。但在F 015上，我並不接受這種批評，因爲上世紀五六十年代的汽車是非常保守的，因爲當時社會的主流觀念是父親要坐在車子前排。你在迪士尼動畫中也能看到同樣的畫面。根據五十年代對性別的刻板印象，父親總是開着車子去辦公室而不是走路去，家庭主婦和孩子則老是去逛街購物。但我們的車型整合了人與人之間的通訊結構。它的設計更像是一款機器人而不是一輛轎車。在我們的願景中，“機器人轎車”或“移動機器人”可以改善人們的互動。

HH: When that board meeting happened in 2012, we stepped into the void left by the rejection of the other team’s concept. So, when we presented, the board said, “Yes, that’s very futuristic. We believe in that. Can you go further and deeper?” This is when we got permission to continue our work.

霍爾格o赫特森拉伯：在2012年的那次董事會上，其他團隊提出的概念都被董事會否決了。當我們進行展示時，董事會表示：“好，這個概念非常未來主義，我們相信這個概念。你可以走得更深更遠嗎？”就這樣，我們得到了董事會的批准，繼續我們的工作。

BB: Was it inevitable that the Mercedes F 015 would take this specific shape?

奔馳F 015採取這種特別的外觀是不可避免的嗎？

AM: I would have preferred an interior without seats, but with movable furniture. It would be without safety belts and for just one person.

亞歷山大o曼可夫斯基：我其實更喜歡另一種沒有座位，但有可移動傢俱的內飾方案。那種方案沒有安全帶，而且只適合一個人乘坐。

BB: One person for the whole car but the same size?

一個人坐這麼大的一輛車？

AM: Yes, one person for the whole car would have the ultimate luxury. You could sleep in there without any restraints. But the safety engineers said no, that’s not a good idea.

亞歷山大o曼可夫斯基：是的，一個人佔有整輛車纔是終極的奢華。你可以毫無限制地在車裏睡覺。但負責安全的工程師給我們亮了紅燈，說那不是一個好主意。

BB: The seat was in the middle?

那個座椅是在中間嗎？

HH: It was actually just a huge cushion.

霍爾格o赫特森拉伯：其實那只是一張巨大的牀墊。

AM: Think of how the Romans would have loved it.

亞歷山大o曼可夫斯基：想象一下，羅馬人肯定會非常喜歡它。

HH: Out of all the ideas, we choose two that fit specifically to the Mercedes brand. One was a limousine type, which we called “the future mobility lounge,” which led to the F 015. We came up with a second idea for a taller car, the “future mobility loft.” But at that time, the members of the board decided on the lounge because if we consider this to be a future limousine, that’s our core competence. Mercedes is known for building high-class luxury sedans.

霍爾格o赫特森拉伯：在所有創意中，我們選擇了兩個特別適合奔馳品牌的創意進行比較。其一是豪車型，我們也稱之爲“未來移動休息室”，它最終演變成了今天的F 015。另一個創意中，車子的高度要高一些，它又叫“未來移動閣樓”。當時董事會選擇了“休息室”概念，因爲豪車是我們的核心競爭力，奔馳就是因爲擅長造高端豪華轎車而出名的。

BB: So many times when we look back at futuristic concepts from the past, they look dated. Do you fear this will happen with the F 015?

很多次我們回頭看以往的未來主義概念時，都會產生過時感。你擔心這種情況會發生在F 015上嗎？

AM: No, because you have good futuristic concepts, which look futuristic even today. Think of racing cars from the 1930s and 1940s. They still look impressive and futuristic today. And there are futuristic concepts that were ugly at the time, and people said that in ten years, everybody would grow accustomed to the design. Ten years later, they were ugly again.

亞歷山大o曼可夫斯基：不，有些很好的未來主義概念即便在今天看起來也依然不過時。你不妨想想上世紀三四十年代的賽車，它們即便在今天看來也令人印象深刻並充滿未來色彩。當然，也有些未來主義概念在當時看起來就很難看，有人說十年後人們大概就習慣了那種設計，但真到了十年後，它們依然很難看。

BB: Do you see elements of this arriving well before 2030 in, for example, the S-Class.

你認爲這些元素會在2030年前出現在奔馳S級等車型上嗎？

HH: Sure. As soon as the either the design or the technology is mature enough to be released, and the legal aspects are solved, we will let all this thinking go into production.

霍爾格o赫特森拉伯：當然。等到它的設計或技術足夠成熟，法律方面的問題也得到解決時，我們就會把所有的想法投入量產。

AM: This is not a game. It’s too expensive to be a game.

亞歷山大o曼可夫斯基：花費了這麼昂貴的代價，它不可能是一個遊戲。