Found in Scrapyard: The egg that hatched Mercedes’ second-gen MBUX infotainment system

For various reasons, including legality and corporate secrecy, concept cars are generally destroyed by their automakers after public display. It doesn’t matter whether the concept births a production vehicle—or, as in this case, whether the concept was even a running and driving car. This engine-less Mercedes-built egg, built in 2020 to showcase a new generation of its MBUX infotainment system, should have been eliminated. Somehow, it wasn’t, and now it’s sitting in an Atlanta scrapyard.

Found last month, this suicide-door egg first cropped up on Reddit in April 2023. It does, technically, have four wheels—someone removed the lower “skirt” that originally hid them—but Mercedes never intended the outside to be anything more than the barest shell: The goodness is inside.

Found this weird thing in the local scrapyard
byu/Alodarsc2 innamethatcar

Click through the slideshow, and voila—the sumptuous, screen-decked interior that set the standard for the seventh-gen S-Class, as well as for the all-electric EQ models. Mercedes calls the setup MBUX (Mercedes-Benz User eXperience), while BMW calls its infotainment system iDrive, or Jeep uses “UConnect.” Each is a catch-all term for what an occupant sees and interacts with, including the digital displays, touch-sensitive and otherwise. Now in its third generation—the one which brought Angry Birds to Benz dashboard screens—MBUX was entering its second generation in 2020 when this egg was built to showcase it ahead of the launch of the 2021 S-Class.

MBUX debuted in 2020 with a host of features that we typically associate with laptops and smartphones, including face, voice, and fingerprint recognition, not to mention touch-sensitive displays, gesture recognition, cloud connectivity, and 16 GB of RAM. The second generation was “even more digital and intelligent,” reads the press release, touting upgrades to hardware and software, and emphasizing the system’s ability to work with other vehicle systems (such in-cabin cameras and weight sensors in the seats) and sensor data: “For example, the exit warning function in the S-Class now uses cameras to recognize that an occupant wants to leave the vehicle.”

Born in 2018, the second-generation infotainment system is most obviously recognized by its portrait-oriented touchscreen, an OLED model measuring 12.8 inches from corner to corner. Mercedes planned to install it in a bevy of models and chose the 2021 model year S-Class as the first recipient: A fitting choice, given that the model has long been a company flagship, and thus, the birthplace of its most innovative features.

In the past three years, that touchscreen has trickled downward in the brand’s hierarchy of vehicles and for 2024 appears in its second-smallest SUV, the GLC. Several higher-level, all-electric models—though not the S-Class—have already replaced it with a bigger one, also running the MBUX software: The truly massive Hyperscreen, three displays behind one sheet of glass measuring 56 inches diagonally and stretching nearly A-pillar to A-pillar. Sometime after the egg’s debut in 2020 and its scrapping—as recently as nine months ago, though we can’t be sure—Mercedes fitted the Hyperscreen to the egg. Since pre-production concepts are terrifically expensive to build, and a new design always needs extensive testing, this seems like a logical install.

Other non-screen features from this egg concept appeared in the S-Class, such as the seats, with their plush pillows, and the beautifully machined speaker grilles.

What is the future of this particular concept? In all likelihood, the same as it ever was: The crusher. Mercedes, whose U.S. HQ is in Atlanta, clearly has no use for it, and only the most masochistic of auto-computer geeks would venture to maintain this. That said, if you or your friend plan to swoop in and save this weird German egg, let us know: You’re our kind of weird.

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