Mercedes-Benz is testing an upgraded driver assistance system that aims to work more like a collaborative partner than a traditional cruise control. In a recent demo in a CLA sedan, the company showcased how its Drive Assist Pro feature can manage complex city driving with minimal human input.
Light taps on the brake allow the driver to shed a few miles per hour without fully disengaging the system. Once the pressure is released, the car returns to its original speed, mirroring how drivers can briefly accelerate while using conventional cruise control and then resume the preset pace.
When given a destination, Drive Assist Pro anticipates upcoming lane changes and adjusts position accordingly. The car can recognize stop signs and traffic lights, and it detects speed bumps, slowing down to handle them smoothly.
On a roughly 20-minute drive through busy city streets shared with robotaxis, the CLA reportedly completed the route without the human driver needing to intervene. Some other demonstration runs, however, were tripped up by human crosswalk attendants moving with handheld stop signs, highlighting the challenges of unpredictable urban environments.
During the demo, the CLA maintained legal speeds, navigated construction zones, and managed around double-parked vehicles—one of the most common urban driving obstacles. One quirk is its behavior at stop signs: the system takes a deliberate amount of time to come to a complete stop and then proceed, which could frustrate impatient drivers behind who are used to rolling “California stops.”
These capabilities are enabled by the CLA’s architecture as a software-defined vehicle. Instead of relying on many separate electronic control units, the car consolidates functions into four powerful computers that run its electronics and advanced driver-assistance features.
One of those computers is Nvidia’s Orin chip, which handles perception and path planning. According to Magnus Östberg, chief software officer at Mercedes-Benz, the company has overhauled its autonomous driving stack.
“We completely elevated our autonomous driving stack. It is no longer on a rule-based stack,” Östberg said. The system now uses an end-to-end AI model, “which of course is giving you some basic advantages. When it comes to parking, for example, [it offers] much faster navigation of parking lots…, moving in and out of the parking lots, but also already you find… how it’s on the highway and how it actually follows the lane and moving across it.”
By shifting to this AI-driven approach on a centralized computing platform, Mercedes-Benz is positioning its latest models to support more advanced driver assistance features and faster software updates over time.