If you're the guy in charge of leading Daimler—you know, the world’s largest luxury carmaker, one of Europe’s most important tech companies, and the inventor of the automobile—into a threatening future, it can’t hurt to have a name that sounds made for a superhero. Good thing it's a guy named Wilko Stark helming CASE (that’s connectivity, autonomous, shared and services, and electric mobility), which Daimler launched in 2016 to address the most promising and troubling trends under one roof. He’s the fellow tasked with forging a 20-year blueprint for Daimler and its flagship, Mercedes-Benz.

Between electrification, autonomy, car sharing, and ride hailing, the car industry is undergoing a monumental, unprecedented shift. So we sat down with Stark to hear about his plans for bringing Daimler into this future—no cape necessary.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

Diversify Your Portfolio

When he took over CASE a year ago, Stark also picked up the reins of Daimler’s nascent electric mobility brand EQ (electric intelligence), which will roll out at least 10 zero-emission models by 2022. To go with it, Daimler added the contents of its mobility portfolio, including the most popular ride-hailing app in all of Europe, MyTaxi, car-sharing platform car2go, public-transit app Moovel, and black-car service Blacklane.

Stark: It’s a great opportunity, the most interesting job within Mercedes, to define the future. And not only define the future from a strategic point of view, but also make it happen. You have to combine these trends. Our target is to be at the forefront of this development. Like we did 130 years ago when we invented the automobile, our ambition is to define the future of mobility.

We have all the technology you need. If you consider self-driving cars and mobility services, what do you need? You need a platform for mobility services, an app. This is what we have with MyTaxi. You need a fleet-management system. This is what we have with Daimler Fleet Management System. You need an asset provider, someone to finance it, so we have Daimler Financial Services. And then you need the vehicle, fully integrated, and you need all the autonomous-driving stuff. So we can cover the whole value chain.

Mobility Trends Are an Opportunity, Not an Existential Crisis

You don’t need to be a three-comma futurist to predict how these trends will shake the calcified automotive industry. The coming change has automakers scrambling to reframe themselves as glimmering tech companies, à la Tesla, rather than antiquated builders of oil-gulping people movers. But what some see as a threat, Mercedes-Benz calls a chance.

Stark: Failure is absolutely a possibility. But that’s why we have to combine these trends, because in the future we will still have cars. If you look at the global market, the number of cars sold is still rising, and will rise over the next 10 to 20 years. So there’s a huge market potential. In inner cities you will have more car-sharing opportunities and mobility services, but this doesn’t mean that people will not have their own cars anymore. It’s a combination of different worlds.

LEARN MORE The WIRED Guide to Self-Driving Cars

Of course the phasing-out of traditional cars is already taking place: the announcement of the Paris government to ban first diesels and then combustion-engine cars. And many major cities are going to go 100 percent electric.

Truly self-driving cars will be applied in the first step in mobility services, like MyTaxi, Uber, Lyft, etc, for one simple reason: The sensor technology and computing power will be quite expensive. Private customers will have to wait until it gets cheaper, because the first step will be far too expensive.

But this doesn’t matter because if you have a self-driving car embedded in an Uber or MyTaxi fleet you don’t need a driver anymore, so you can balance the cost for the driver and put it into the technology. This development is definitely coming, but it won’t come overnight. So one part of your fleet will be self-driving cars, but there will still be a huge portion of human drivers in Uber and MyTaxi.