Hey Mercedes, take me to work

Mercedes-Benz claims its latest technology allows you to control almost everything in your car by voice. Piers Ward papers over the touchscreen in an EQS to test the theory

- Piers Ward

To talk about the Mercedes-Benz EQS, we really need to go back to the beginning, all the way to Steve Jobs' speech at Macworld 2007. Because that's when Apple launched the iPhone and sent a lightning bolt across the technological landscape. From that moment, the interaction between humans and technology would never be the same again.

It was classic Jobs: trademark roll-neck, building up his audience, who responded with plenty of whooping and hollering. (Americans...) We're still feeling the effects now. That day, the mobile phone was transformed from simply a portable version of your landline into a whole new way of life.

And because it was so seismic, it's inevitable that it has trickled into cars. Touchscreens are everywhere now, along with their fiddly multitude of menus. Jobs' skill was stripping everything back to be high-tech yet usable. Car manufacturers haven't grasped that at the same rate.

Take the Hyperscreen in the EQS, probably the ultimate current iteration of screen. With a total of 42.3 inches lathered across the dashboard in a continuous high-definition onslaught from door to door, it's so vast and intimidating that you could spend a month camped in here and still not work out all the functions.

But what if you don't actually need to touch it? What if it could simply be the automotive equivalent of the household television: a display screen and nothing else? That's what Mercedes is aiming for with its Hey Mercedes software, the voice control element of the EQS that the German company believes will ease everyone's fears over ever more complicated touchscreens.

As a result, I'm busy papering over 30 of those 42.3 inches (the speedometer is still needed) to see if I can manage my 120-mile commute into the Autocar office using only my voice. No screen shall be touched in the making of this feature.