Stephan Reichle, Team Leader for Testing & Application of Driver Assistance Systems, and his employees Timo Wolf, Marc Weiss and Marcus Grejner provide insights into their work in an interview.

As we can see in the pictures, dummies are used for cyclists, motorcyclists and pedestrians for safety reasons. What is the situation with the vehicles that you are approaching with your braking manoeuvre?

Marc: We use both dummies and real vehicles. For critical manoeuvres, we cannot use real vehicles in order not to jeopardise the safety of the drivers – and it would be far too expensive in the event of a crash. In this case, we use so-called balloon or puzzle cars. But if the test situation allows, we also use real vehicles.

Where do you mainly test?

Marcus: We use the test track in the EVZ in Wörth or also carry out the tests in part on other, external test sites if we need more space or other framework conditions.

Stephan: In winter, we often drive on test tracks in Spain because the weather there is more stable than in Germany and we can therefore test in a reproducible manner. This means that we can repeat the tests over and over again and thus prove in the event of any errors that these are not caused by the test setup, but lie in the system behaviour. Based on the results, the assistance system can then be optimised in order to run as efficiently and error-free as possible in the customers’ vehicles in the future.
 

Why do you also test on public roads?
 

Stephan: The sensors of the driver assistance systems rely on interaction with the real environment. That’s why we capture numerous situations on public roads that allow us to evaluate our systems. Does the system respond correctly? Doesn't it react too early? Or if the system has detected something and triggered it briefly even though a warning or braking would not have been necessary – we then call this “false positive”.
On test tracks, on the other hand, we stress the systems to the physical limits and beyond in order to make the systems as safe and efficient as possible. Here we check the performance of the systems. If the system did not detect an obstacle or did not detect it in time – then we speak of “false negative”

Timo: Of course, we never let our vehicles drive into a dangerous situation in real traffic. A test on a real pedestrian, as we do with our dummies, is never done on public roads.
 

What are the challenges of your work?
 

Stephan: The development cycles and times are a major challenge. In the area of driver assistance systems, new functions will be introduced at regular intervals – these are very tight schedules to fully implement everything. 
We all carry the vision of accident-free driving within us, which we want to implement despite all the challenges!

What do you like most about your job?
 

Marcus: The collegiality and cohesion in the team as well as the good cooperation with other colleagues who support us from the workshop, for example.

Marc: Our very varied field of work is the highlight for me.

Timo: In our job, we don't just sit in the office, but we go out on the road again and again, we experience the assistance systems live and can observe the progress made by the systems up to series production.

Stephan: For me, the highlight of my job is that I can make a contribution every day to achieving the goal of accident-free driving. 
 As we always have the latest safety systems in our series trucks, our aim is to ensure that they work best in all our vehicles.
The good thing about our tasks is also that we are part of a global development network and therefore work internationally with all colleagues in Daimler Truck Development worldwide. For example, we are also regularly on trials in the USA, Portland and Madras, as well as the colleagues of Daimler Truck North America often on trials in Europe. This helps us to recognise vehicle-specific conditions early on and to take them into account in system development.