Automotive Radar has already found its way into nearly all car manufacturers portfolio, even for small car platforms. Over the decades, the performance requirements increased steadily from simple detector tasks in blind spot monitoring systems to multi range smart environment perception sensors. The utmost push in performance requirement is initiated with the trend towards highly automated driving. Future automotive radar systems have to provide imaging like capabilities and have to interact in radar networks, which allow for highly comprehensive perception tasks. The paper will provide an overview on state of the art automotive radar usage on the basis of the DAIMLER car platforms, will give an outline on future requirements for highly automated driving and will present recent approaches in radar based environmental perception.