The prevailing view has been that autonomous‑driving world models must choose between two extremes: a perception‑only pipeline that reconstructs the current bird’s‑eye‑view (BEV) layout, or a generative model that rolls forward future geometry without a semantic grasp of the scene. HERMES++ demonstrates that a single network can inhabit both roles, answering natural‑language queries while extrapolating the road ahead. Previously, scene‑understanding systems relied on dense BEV encoders tuned fo...