Solar coating, in-motor brakes: here’s some of the tech Mercedes wants in its cars by 2040 – Top Gear

At a recent workshop in its home city of Stuttgart, Mercedes-Benz opened up the doors to its future, showing TG some of the tech that it plans to incorporate into its cars between now and 2040. 

Ever heard of power converters? They’re used to manage voltage levels within an electric car’s batteries. The current issue with them is that if even a single cell gets dirty or damaged, the efficiency of an entire string of cells is affected. To solve this, Merc wants to set the strings up in a parallel connection with each cell equipped with its own converter.

This could not only help improve efficiency and charging but allow different battery types and cell chemistries to be used. It also means banks of cells can be shut down when they aren’t needed, essentially mimicking cylinder deactivation in combustion cars. Neat, huh?

Another innovation is solar coating – not to be confused with solar panelling. Merc equipped the EQXX with a solar panel roof, which helped gain an extra 18.6 miles of range during its record-breaking 746-mile drive. Solar coating will take this a step further by enveloping any part of a car’s body that can be painted with a thin layer of photovoltaic material called nanoparticles. 

These are also much stronger than regular solar panels, which are made of silicone, and though the colour of paint used on top of the material could affect the efficiency slightly, Merc says you could theoretically gain up to 7,450 miles of range per year in ideal circumstances. If you’re a ranch owner in the Mojave Desert, for example. Possibly less so if you live up in the Scottish Highlands.

Mercedes even wants to take a different approach to stopping. It’s exploring the possibility of fitting its cars with ‘in-drive brakes’. Here, the brakes aren’t conventionally located within a car’s wheels, but instead, they’ll be integrated directly into the electric motor. 

These could not only be lighter, quieter and produce less brake particle emissions, but they would also mean your wheels won’t get as rusty because they aren’t sheltering any discs and pads. Mercedes is aiming for each of these in-wheel braking systems to last around 186,000 miles (300,000km) and says a solution will also be devised for single-motor cars.

There’s news of Merc’s plans for the future of interiors too, starting with a new lightweight composite polymer called ‘Bionicast’. Created by milling old tyres into an unwoven structure, before adding bio-based proteins from plants to create a ‘dry white’ canvas sheet to process into a cleaner – and much stronger – alternative to cowhide leather. S-Class owners, reckon you could get on board with this?

Another highly scalable material will apparently be ‘Biotech silk’. Instead of harvesting silk directly from web spinners, Merc will ferment the DNA from their bacteria to create a dry silk powder that can be spun into fibres. It’s a completely biodegradable process that we could see implemented as early as 2030. Anyone else’s brain hurt?

There’s more. An advancement that probably won’t be ready for 2030 is ‘Neuromorphic Computing’ (NC) – or the next generation of computer chips that should allow for SAE Level 4 autonomy.

And here’s the smart thing: the NCs may be operating at up to 3,000W, but they’ll apparently only use 300W. How, you ask? Mercedes wants to try and mimic the computational abilities of… your own brain, which is an incredibly efficient system that runs at SAE Level 5 but only uses around 20W of power. See, you’re more impressive than you give yourself credit for.

In successfully doing so, the AI-based functionality of Merc’s cars could also increase, with the idea being to optimise the entire process chain for ADAS technology. For example, traffic sign recognition could be up to 9.3 times more efficient with this chip, while lane detection could be improved by up to 7.8 times. 

Cameras could also be improved with an ‘event-based’ system, where each pixel is individual from one another. It means every pixel will be triggered by new light exposure, which makes the entire thing more responsive. Impressive.

The final invention is a new augmented reality headpiece, which relays every bit of information you need within your line of sight, so no need to move your head while driving. It can be used to augment the view ahead of you to incorporate live directions into the road. Very cool. 

There we have it then, the future of motoring. But which of Merc’s projects do you think is most likely to actually make production?