Mercedes-Benz will begin using sensor and video data from customer vehicles to improve its advanced driver assistance and automated driving functions from the end of July.
It said data collection would proceed only with vehicle-owner consent, and the company has pledged full transparency regarding data handling, storage and processing.
Renata Jungo Brüngger, Board Member for Integrity, Governance and Sustainability at Mercedes-Benz, said the move responds to the need for high-quality, diverse real-world data to train systems that can react reliably in complex traffic situations.
Until now, automated functions have been trained exclusively on data from dedicated test vehicles. Incorporating customer-vehicle data will enable the recognition of seldom-encountered road-user groups such as children, cyclists and people with restricted mobility, as well as unusual traffic scenarios like temporary rerouting or pop-up cycle lanes.
Collected data will be stored temporarily — triggered by specific events such as heavy braking — and transmitted selectively to Mercedes-Benz’s back-end servers.
There it will be anonymised and decoupled from individual vehicle identification.
Customers may revoke consent at any time, and any member of the public who believes they have been recorded may request deletion of image data by providing the time and place of the recording.
Mercedes-Benz said that insights derived from customer-fleet data would not only enhance in-vehicle safety features but may also inform future traffic-management strategies and infrastructure adjustments.
Updated algorithms and features would be delivered via over-the-air software updates, ensuring continuous refinement of assistance and automated systems.
Mercedes-Benz described digital trust as a cornerstone of sustainable mobility and corporate governance. To this end, experts in engineering, legal affairs, ethics and compliance collaborate from project inception to guarantee responsible implementation of new technologies.
With its “Vision Zero” goal of eliminating road fatalities in the European Union by 2050, Mercedes-Benz aims to leverage customer data as a key asset in advancing automated driving safety.
