Mercedes-Benz rang in CES 2026 on Monday with an updated version of its driver assistance system due to arrive in new cars starting this spring. Dubbed MB.Drive Assist Pro, it’s an optional feature on the all-new CLA EV. Assist Pro is a more advanced version of the company’s MB.Drive Assist, which is already available in several vehicles and has been used to drive roughly 15 million miles (24 billion kilometers) worldwide.
Ahead of CES, Mercedes brought a CLA equipped with the Assist Pro software to San Francisco in December for a media day to test out its city driving. Similar to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system, the Assist Pro functions on city streets, not just on highways like the advanced driving systems from General Motors, Ford, Rivian, and others.
At the media day, Mercedes highlighted the system’s “point-to-point” driving capabilities on highways and urban roadways as well as its cooperative steering. Though Assist Pro is technically a Level 2 driver-assist system, Mercedes refers to it as a “Level 2++ system” or “Level 2 optimized,” arguing that drivers using Assist Pro are clearly in control and more alert than those using other systems.
“It’s the best of two worlds,” Christoph von Hugo, head of active safety at Mercedes, said at the San Francisco event. Von Hugo added that drivers can give Assist Pro suggestions, such as telling it to change lanes, take a different turn than the one listed on the map, or drive further from parked cars than the system suggests.
I was given a chance to try Assist Pro as a passenger during the San Francisco event with a Mercedes representative in the driver’s seat. We used Assist Pro during a 20-minute drive through San Francisco’s northern neighborhoods, which includes the dense North Beach. Although the CLA followed a mapped-out route, every action it took was based on impromptu decision-making while on the road.
Overall, the system appeared to perform well during this short demo. When the CLA encountered double-parked cars on a main neighborhood thoroughfare, it easily maneuvered around the obstacles. In another case, a delivery driver jumped out into the street and the car respectfully waited for the human to get out of the way. Most impressive was a tricky, diagonal intersection at the junction of North Beach and Chinatown, which the CLA handled without issue.
However, Assist Pro exhibited the same persistent “problems” of machines driving in city streets as seen in Teslas using FSD and with Waymo’s Jaguar I-Paces. You know what I mean. There were the awkwardly slow four-way stops and other overly legal driving behaviors. No one actually drives like that, but it is ultimately safer driving.
Mercedes worked with Nvidia for all software features on the new CLA, including automated driving. Ali Kani, head of automotive products at Nvidia, laid out the components built into the system on top of Nvidia’s Orin supercomputer, which includes 10 cameras and five radar sensors.
At the San Francisco media day, Kani called the CLA an “AI-defined vehicle.” He went on to demonstrate how the automated driving system was trained on synthetically generated data and neural reconstruction, which builds out different possible scenarios based on one real scenario.
“In self-driving, you cannot make a mistake,” Kani said.
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