Mercedes‑Benz has announced its plans to accelerate the development of a robotaxi ecosystem using the latest S‑Class model. The vehicle combines luxury and advanced technology, featuring redundancies in steering, braking, computing and power supply to support safe automated operation. With the Mercedes-Benz Operating System (MB.OS) platform, it is positioned for potential deployment as a driverless shuttle service across markets in America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East.
Mercedes‑Benz has pushed the SAE-Level 4 development in various projects around the world with leading partners, leveraging the potential of its proprietary operating system MB.OS. “Mercedes‑Benz is the pioneer in safe autonomous driving. The next step on our roadmap is to enable a robotaxi experience based on the new S‑Class. To accomplish our goal, we have strong industry-leading partners at our side. For us, these partnerships mark the beginning of our entry into the robotaxi market with the S-Class and MB.OS as the ultimate platform,” said Jörg Burzer, member of the board of management and chief technology officer, development and procurement, Mercedes-Benz Group AG.
Mercedes‑Benz and Nvidia are collaborating to create a robotaxi ecosystem together with Uber based on the new S‑Class. Nvidia will implement its Nvidia Drive Hyperion architecture and full‑stack Nvidia Drive AV L4 software. It will further be enhanced by Nvidia Alpamayo open AI models, simulation tools and datasets to bring reasoning‑based, safety‑first autonomy to the platform. Mercedes‑Benz and Nvidia have a strong collaboration in the field of automated driving development, with Nvidia’s expertise in AI-based software development being used for Mercedes’ new generation of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) systems.
At the close of 2025, the car maker announced another L4 project in cooperation with Momenta to develop a robotaxi experience based on the new S‑Class. The mobility provider Lumo – a subsidiary of the technology company K2 – plans to operate the shuttles initially in Abu Dhabi with the option for more locations later. The first S‑Class robotaxi test vehicles will be deployed on the roads in Abu Dhabi later this year.
In related news, Waabi has raised US$750m and partnered with Uber to deploy robotaxis