Image: Andrei Niemimaki/Flickr
If Mercedes-Benz has its way, autonomously driven vehicles will be able to analyze your smartphone's calendar and know exactly when and where you need a ride.The carmaker told Reuters that pushing a button to summon a human-driven car is already old news (not to mention a business already cornered by the likes of Uber, Lyft, and Didi Kuaidi in China). Instead, Dieter Zetsche, the CEO of Mercedes' parent company, offered that it "would be even more convenient if the car came to you autonomously.""[It] would be extremely practical if the [autonomous car] appeared without needing to be prompted, once my appointment in the calendar had come to an end," Zetsche said. Who needs an assistant—virtual or otherwise—when your autonomous car already anticipates your transportation needs for you?Mercedes is already laying the groundwork for this to become reality.Last month, the company joined with several other car makers to buy Nokia's Here maps for a cool $3.1 billion, betting that these detailed maps, combined with advanced radar, can help kickstart the age of self-driving cars. This is also the reason why Uber bought Microsoft's Bing maps, along with a whole host of mapping engineers, back in June and why Uber is raiding academia for robotics talent.Mercedes has already shown off an autonomous vehicle prototype, but they're not expected to be on the road for at least 10 years as regulators attempt to figure out how all of this shakes out.