In the future, you’ll always be at work. That’s what this new partnership between Mercedes Benz, Cisco, and (apparently) Zoom signals. You can probably guess what it entails.
If you guessed that Merc is adding the ability to have online meetings to its cars, congratulations on being able to infer from context (and your deep knowledge of the tech industry). Specifically, the 2024 Mercedes Benz E-Class is in line for some online meeting action when it launches next year.
Time to ‘meet’ the Mercedes
At least this means that it’s just the boss who has to log in while in traffic. The engineers at Merc aren’t idiots, obviously, so there are some terms and conditions to using it. Cisco’s Webex will be available as a download for the vehicle. So will Zoom, according to some reports — the app is already available in Tesla’s vehicles.
But downloading and activating the camera will be subject to specific safety features. You can take audio meetings while the car is in motion. You could just do a phone call but this version of the meeting uses the vehicle’s own systems instead. If you’d like to participate in a video call, the car has to be stationary. Sadly, you won’t get to see your boss flipping off traffic while you’re updating him on the department’s weekly performance.
Also coming to the new Merc E-Class? Natively-supported TikTok, because that’s one hell of an overlapping Venn diagram. You can also expect more vehicular microtransactions in the company’s new cars. These will take various forms, depending on what’s supported by the market at the time. We’ll probably skip out on the EV charging priority ‘feature’ for a while.