• Mercedes-Benz is the first foreign automaker to receive permission to test SAE Level 4 prototypes on the streets of Beijing, giving a taste of the technology the manufacturer plans to offer in privately purchased vehicles.
• Until now, Level 4 has been seen primarily as a technology for corporate fleets of robotaxis and semi-trailers, with limited potential for private ownership – at least this decade.
• The automaker was also the first to offer SAE Level 3 vehicles in the United States (albeit only in a few states), which allow hands-free driving on certain roads.

SAE Level 4 vehicles have been deployed in small numbers in a number of countries in recent years, including robot taxis, robot delivery vehicles and self-driving trucks. And despite some stumbling blocks, self-driving, geofenced vehicles now seem to be more about size, regulatory approval and business considerations than the technology.

Mercedes-Benz recently became the first foreign car manufacturer to receive permission to test Level 4 vehicles on certain highways and city streets in Beijing, continuing the Level 3 testing phase in China that began last year.

“The project focuses on studying multisensor perception in highly automated driving, verifying system performance under different conditions and exploring deep perception integration,” the automaker explains.

Currently, this is a relatively small-scale test program that uses only two S-Class models with lidar, radar and camera sensor capsules.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of this latest revelation is not the fact that Mercedes-Benz Test There are no Level 4 vehicles per se, but the company plans to offer Level 4 technology in private vehicles worldwide at some point in the future.

“With the new approval to test Level 4 technology in the Beijing area, which will later be used in private vehicles worldwide, Mercedes-Benz is taking a big step forward on the road to autonomous driving,” said Markus Schäfer, Member of the Board of Management of Mercedes-Benz Group AG, Chief Technology Officer, Development & Purchasing.

Of course, this is still a pipe dream at the moment, but for several years now, SAE Level 4 has been viewed as something aimed almost exclusively at commercial fleets rather than private vehicles, for a variety of reasons.

First and foremost, there are the hardware costs involved and the complexity of having Level 4 vehicles operating not just in the inner cities of a handful of carefully mapped cities, but potentially in hundreds of suburbs with thousands of vehicles.

In other words, it has been seen as making sense to have Waymo SAE Level 4 robot taxis driving around parts of San Francisco and LA if there are paying customers for fleet operations, but it is seen as making less sense if automakers start selling robot taxis to individuals for commuting and running errands.

Current Level 4 operations also require a significant number of human employees working behind the scenes almost 24/7, solving traffic problems that robotaxis inevitably encounter. Robotaxis developers do not believe it is possible to remotely deploy this large number of employees to oversee the operations of private vehicles, at least not at this time.

For this reason, despite the limited success of some robotaxi fleets around the world, privately operated Level 4 vehicles are not yet considered tangible.

Mercedes now seems to be turning this assumption on its head and is proposing that vehicle owners at some point in the future could Let your car drive you to work without the driver having to intervene or pay attention, possibly even while sitting in the back seat.

Likewise, a Level 4 vehicle could theoretically drive your kids to school, return home, and pick them up again in the afternoon—all on its own. Ultimately, this is where Level 4 could intersect with Level 5, the holy grail of autonomous vehicle research.

And we have to admit that once Mercedes-Benz or another automaker introduces Level 4 privately owned vehicles in some limited geographic areas, the distance to non-geofenced operation could largely be a matter of 3D mapping and regulatory approval.

Of course, it remains to be seen Where Mercedes is allowed to sell private vehicles with level 4 autonomy. Selling cars with SAE level 3 technology in just a few US states was already a difficult undertaking with many reservations for regulatory reasons, and so far only Mercedes has succeeded.

Could there be a market for Mercedes S-Class sedans with SAE Level 4 technology in the coming years, or will this technology remain too expensive to be worthwhile in the short term? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Jay Ramey grew up around very strange European cars, and rather than seeking something reliable and comfortable for his personal use, he has been drawn to the more adventurous side of the reliability spectrum. Although he has been haunted by French cars for the past decade, he has somehow managed to avoid owning a Citroën, considering them too mundane, and is currently looking at cars from the former Czechoslovakia. Jay has been with Autoweek since 2013.