Mercedes-Benz' autonomous driving capable F 015 has front seats that rotate and allow the driver and front-seat passenger to turn and interact with rear-seat passengers.
Dauner said, "The premium carmakers show higher interest in autonomous driving than volume carmakers, as their value is better justified."
Marco Hecker, Deloitte's China Auto Consulting Practice managing partner, said intelligent functions help carmakers in brand building as they bring a halo effect to the brand, even though the customer may not really use the function.
Chairman of China Machinery Industry Federation Wang Ruixiang said last year: "The innovations are becoming a trend. A car is becoming a mobile platform carrying people's work and lives, and fulfilling more and more daily needs."
Qu Guochun, deputy director general of the machinery industry department under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said, "Customers have started to focus on intelligent functions, and their demands are evolving, so the carmakers are accelerating their research and development on intelligent systems and have launched driving assist functions."
In the first half of last year, industry experts said they expected single lane highway autopilot technology would be introduced in 2016. However, autonomous driving on highways was successfully tested by Mercedes-Benz, Audi, BMW and Volvo in 2015, and by Nissan in January.
Volvo expects to roll out 100 units of its fully autonomous car in real traffic for a trial in Sweden in 2017.
Legal restrictions
The majority of such tests are conducted in the United States, with several in Germany and Sweden. In China, BMW and Baidu worked together on an autonomous driving test, in December.
"We choose the city because the California regulator allowed us to do the test," said chairman and CEO of Nissan Motor Carlos Ghosn in San Francisco ahead of an autonomous driving demonstration in January, "The situations vary from country to country."
Chinese laws do not have clear terms on autonomous driving, but they forbid a driver from taking both hands off the steering wheel.
BCG projected that China would have the largest amount of fully and partial autonomous vehicles in the world by 2035, with the number of partial autonomous vehicles expected to reach 5.2 million units, and fully autonomous predicted to reach 3.4 million.
KPMG's Global Automotive Executive Survey released in January shows China has become the No 1 place to pilot new innovations or launch new products according to 16 percent of this year's executives, followed by Germany and the US.
