AI could put car designers out of work within 10 years, Mercedes design boss says

Ever dreamed of becoming a car designer? That fantasy could move even further from reality for aspiring automotive stylists thanks to the constant strides being made by artificial intelligence (AI).

In fact, Mercedes design boss Gordon Wagener has admitted that machine intelligence could make his job obsolete within a decade.

Speaking at a recent event in Miami, Wagener weighed in on the AI debate and how it could shape automotive design going forward.

“We work with AI now. You get 99% of crap with AI and sheer quantity. That’s the biggest problem - sorting out the good stuff from the bad,” the design head told ABC News. “But you get 1% good stuff and we keep learning. It’s getting better every day. AI will drastically change the way we design. I think in 10 years maybe most of design will be done by AI and it will make designers obsolete. My successor will be a machine and will be much cheaper than my salary.”

Other car manufacturers are also using AI to aid the design process.

In 2023 Toyota said it had developed a generative AI technique that would assist in the early design stages where different iterations of a project were required for engineers to compare.

At the time Avinash Balachandran of the Toyota Research Institute, said AI still had many limitations from an engineering perspective.

“Generative AI tools are often used as inspiration for designers, but cannot handle the complex engineering and safety considerations that go into actual car design,” Balachandran said.

This could certainly change in the future, however.

At the same Miami event, Mercedes design head Wagener spoke of autonomous cars and said he believed that fully self-driving vehicles were still akin to science fiction and would be extremely expensive to build for the foreseeable future, Carscoops reported.

He does not expect cars to come without steering wheels any time soon, although cars are expected to increasingly become more akin to a “smart home” on wheels.

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