Mercedes-Benz announced at CES 2026 on Monday an updated version of its driver assistance system due to the arrival of new cars starting this spring. It’s called MB.Drive Assist Pro, an optional feature on the new CLA EV. Assist Pro is the most advanced version of the company’s MB.Drive Assist, which is already available in many cars and has been used to drive almost 15 million kilometers (24 billion miles) around the world.
Ahead of CES, Mercedes brought a CLA equipped with Assist Pro software to San Francisco in December for a press day to test its city driving. Similar to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system, Assist Pro works on city streets, not just highways like advanced driving systems from General Motors, Ford, Rivian, and others.
At the press day, Mercedes highlighted the system’s driving capabilities on highways and city roads as well as its cooperative steering. Although Assist Pro is technically a Level 2 driver assistance system, Mercedes calls it a “Level 2++ system” or “Level 2 optimized,” arguing that drivers using Assist Pro are more clearly in control and more alert than those using other systems.
“It’s the best of both worlds,” said Christoph von Hugo, head of operational safety at Mercedes, 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 farther from parked cars than the system suggests.
I was given the opportunity to try Assist Pro as a passenger during the San Francisco event with a Mercedes representative in the driver’s seat. We used the Assist Pro during a 20-minute ride through San Francisco’s northern suburbs, including busy North Beach. Although the CLA followed a mapped route, every action it took was based on random decision-making while en route.
Overall, the system seemed to perform well during this short demo. When the CLA encountered cars double-parked on the neighborhood’s main road, it easily navigated around obstacles. In one incident, the driver jumped onto the road and the car politely waited for the person to get out of the way. Most impressive was the treacherous, diagonal intersection at the junction of North Beach and Chinatown, which the CLA handled without issue.
However, Assist Pro showed the same persistent “problems” for devices driving on city roads as seen in Teslas using FSD and Waymo’s Jaguar I-Paces. You know what I mean. There were ridiculously slow stops and other overly legal driving practices. Nobody really drives like that, but it’s ultimately safe to drive.
Mercedes has worked with Nvidia on all aspects of the software in the new CLA, including automated driving. Ali Kani, head of automotive products at Nvidia, placed 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 press day, Kani called the CLA “a car defined by AI.” He continued to go show how an automated driving system was trained on artificially generated data and neural reconstruction, generating various possible scenarios based on a single real-world scenario.
“In self-driving, you can’t go wrong,” said Kani.
Gizmodo is in Las Vegas all week bringing you everything you need to know about the technology unveiled at CES 2026. You can follow CES live blog here again find all our coverage here.
