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Mercedes-Benz Vision Duet Rendering Is an Autonomous Picnic Table Set

Driving the car is a big part of the whole road trip experience, even though the person designated to do it can feel a bit left out at times since they can't join all the activities that go on right next to them.
Mercedes-Benz Vision Duet 18 photos
Photo: Lujie Huang via Behance
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Well, autonomous vehicles are allegedly just around the corner, and once they become mainstream, the road trips this country has known for all these years are suddenly going to change. With the vehicle's AI taking care of the actual driving, everyone inside will be turned into a passenger with zero responsibility as far as controlling the car is concerned.

Of course, keeping the current cabin layout would be pointless under these circumstances, and we've seen this trend of pivoting front seats or even full-on lounge configurations in modern concept cars that doesn't look like it plans on going anywhere soon.

The Mercedes-Benz Vision Duet rendering takes things one step further, but sadly it's in a pretty ridiculous direction if we're to take the real world as a reference point. The project belongs to Lujie Huang and represents his thesis design project at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California.

Let's set one thing straight from the start: the Vision Duet is a beautiful design. In fact, we think Lujie managed to capture the brand's essence and project it 15 years into the future better than some designers working for the German carmaker probably could. The Duet is a beautiful vehicle, but it's also a pretty useless one.

According to the author, the concept is a "3-seat grand tourer that offers [a] new road trip experience." Judging by the way it looks, that experience is reaching your destination slower than pretty much anything else on four wheels. Why? Because the Vision Duet has no doors.

For some reason, the grand tourer of the future doesn't need doors (or anything else for that matter) to keep the air from rushing in and ruining the passenger's hairstyle, lunch, nap, or whatever it is people will do once driving isn't a concern anymore. And if doors are surplus to requirements, so is a windshield, apparently.

The hood of the Vision Duet has a big gaping hole in it just before the point where it was supposed to meet with the windshield. That's where the best seat in the house is - that is if you really don't mind the draft (or flies) hitting the back of your head.

So, is the Vision Duet really previewing the next-generation grand tourer? Hopefully not. Instead, it's just a very good-looking Mercedes-Benz picnic table on wheels that has plenty of value once you reach your destination, but none whatsoever during transit. It's just one of those crazy concepts that's meant to show what can be done just for the sake of it, and in that category, it ranks pretty high.

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About the author: Vlad Mitrache
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"Boy meets car, boy loves car, boy gets journalism degree and starts job writing and editing at a car magazine" - 5/5. (Vlad Mitrache if he was a movie)
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