Mercedes’ Next Flagship Does the Commuting for You

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/12/mercedes-benz-s-class-tech/?pid=2527&viewall=true

by sazpaz • 14 years ago

117 82 14 years ago

paullth• 14 years ago

I saw the first image and thought "finally, a blimp car".... Disappointed now.

frobozz• 14 years ago

Stupid headline. If it's doing the commuting for me, then either I'm working from home (in which case, why am I sending my car to the office), or it's also doing my job for me (which is extremely impressive).

brianchu• 14 years ago

This hardly does the commuting for you. This only lets you follow a car in front of you. If your hands get off the steering wheel, the system reverts to manual. I'll wait until Google's cars get commercialized.

Night vision and automated parallel parking, while useful, will hardly save anyone any time (assuming you get better at parking with practice).

mdemare• 14 years ago

Night vision might save your life - that's a lot of time right there!

ygra2• 14 years ago

Nota bene: Laws regarding driving are fairly strict in Germany, so those measures make sense in a way.

masklinn• 14 years ago

> Night vision [...] will hardly save anyone any time

Unless, of course, you go through areas where boars and deers regularly cross the road. Then it saves time and money.

HeyLaughingBoy3• 14 years ago

Seriously. I would pay good money for a system that would alert me to a deer on the side of the road ahead at night. They don't call whitetails "timber ghosts" for nothing.

allerratio• 14 years ago

The thing is, Googles self-driving cars won't get to you overnight. We may already have the technology, but it's too complex/costly for a normal car yet. (70k$ radar, a rack of servers)

But what you will get is more and more autonomous features until there is the first fully autonomous production vehicle. And this Mercedes is one of the first bigger steps in this direction.

GFischer2• 14 years ago

Well, as many mentioned, 70k might not be so much for trucks... autonomous delivery of goods and services probably will save A LOT of money (and the driver doesn't need to sleep :) )

arethuza4• 14 years ago

"automated parallel parking"

I've started using the park assist feature on our car just for the fun of it - what amazes me is how accurately it parks. Only annoying thing about it is that it won't park on the "wrong" side....

3amOpsGuy• 14 years ago

Not sure if this helps but the Audi system, which I believe is exact the same on VW, Seat & Skoda, will park wrong side but only if you indicate into the side the spaces are on when approaching.

Only mention this because it wasn't documented in my manual and the sales folks had no idea.

In practice i find it's too slow to use, doesn't account for high kerbs with its preprogrammed trajectory (not user adjustable), happily dry steers and can be fooled by a squinty parked car in front of the space. Not a fan yet, but has potential, and if it means ill come back to less dings on the bumpers I'm all for mandating its use ;-)

A better system today is the Toyota reverse parking assist with guidelines overlaid which adjust to your trajectory based on current steering input and speed.

kokey• 14 years ago

Parking assist is fairly useful in Europe, where there are many areas where parking spots are both rare and rather small.

mixmastamyk3• 14 years ago

There's some impressive technology described in this article (and the Google car too, for example). Every time I read about this stuff I can't help but wonder how much time and effort they've spent on QA though. It's never mentioned unfortunately, though understandable.

I know what a pathetic job car companies do with computer security so I'm not optimistic they give QA enough attention either... and therefore not as eager as I should be to trade up from my aging-but-predictable current model.

derwildemomo• 14 years ago

if i may be of assistance here.. when they first demoed their emergency brake assistance ( think of a fancy three-letter acronym i'm totally unaware of here ) system, it.. failed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYY7OfQ4-5A .

But considering how many mercedes test cars I see ( living in Stuttgart ) every day, it seems they are taking QA really, really serious.

mixmastamyk3• 14 years ago

Thanks, glad to hear. The functional testing of the complete product is very important of course, but I'm also referring to rigorous testing of every single block of code.

unwind• 14 years ago

I would be surprised if all of this tech is developed internally by Mercedes.

I would expect a lot of it to be purchased (and then suitably integrated/branded, of course) products from automotive safety technology developers such as Autoliv (http://www.autoliv.com/ProductsAndInnovations/Pages/default....).

That should mean that the QA is not solely done by whoever puts the tech in a car, but first by the dedicated technology development company, which feels nice.

haberman• 14 years ago

> Brake Assist Plus with Cross-Traffic Assist alerts the driver if he's about to get broadsided with visual and audible warnings. If he doesn't take action – or applies too little brake pressure – the S will stop itself.

This thing would be totally useless in an action movie. Clearly it's not targeting the Jason Bourne demographic.

philwelch4• 14 years ago

There's a good reason James Bond goes back to the classic Aston Martin in Skyfall.

sami362• 14 years ago

The price of Google autonomous car's tech : radar, lidars & the litany of sensors & computing power needed to process their data still has a long way to come down to a price that would be palatable to car buyers, say, a 5000 $ option

philwelch4• 14 years ago

A $5000 option would only be a high end add on too. You can get a perfectly good used car for less than that. 5000 adds another 25% to a $20,000 car.

stusmith19772• 14 years ago

The selling point would be that you might only need one car instead of two - which would make 25k more attractive than 2x20k. The use of a self-drive car isn't that it drives you to the office, it's that it drives itself back home for your partner to use.

sami362• 14 years ago

I couldn't agree more. just like hybrids & EVs, it will take some time before the math surrounding that investment would work out. I supposed it would make sense for areas where parking is extremely expensive, it might also make sense for an autonomous towncar/ cab service. I could also see it being adopted by disabled people who would otherwise be barred from driving or DUI repeat offenders. For the rest of us, it will take some time for the investment to catch up with the utility.

GFischer2• 14 years ago

"You can get a perfectly good used car for less than that"

In your country. Over here (Uruguay), cars are taxed to hell (the most expensive cars in the world I believe), so an extra U$ 5.000 won't be much of a difference to those who can afford a car.

Same in Singapore or Hong Kong, where cars themselves might be cheap, but license plates or parking spaces are incredibly expensive. An autonomous car should be HUGE in Singapore.

(Used car imports are banned here)

goatforce5• 14 years ago

If the additional safety benefits worked well enough, you might find discounts to your insurance premiums covering the $5k cost pretty quickly.

bambax• 14 years ago

I would love to have a car that drives itself while I do other things in the back.

I would hate to have a car that tries to tell me how I should drive. This thing started with the bells that ring when your seat belt is not fastened, and it's only getting worse and worse.

arethuza4• 14 years ago

I love the idea of having a car that drives and leaves me to do other stuff - but I can't use a laptop (or even read) in the back of car, I get rather queasy.

I also much prefer doing the driving to being a passenger - so I think the reality for me would that a self driving car would be rather less attractive than you might think, at least for longer journeys.

tammer• 14 years ago

I've always found the reading-in-the-car/motionsickness thing to be very interesting...

I was affected by it for a long time, then suddenly I decided to simply try to 'will' myself out of it, psyching myself into believing that it was all in my head anyway.

The surprising thing is I believe it's worked for me. Telling myself I won't get sick allows me to get caught up on books during long car rides. If I think I will, I'll be horribly nauseous.

mistercow• 14 years ago

Yeah, but beeping when a car is about to T-bone you is pretty bad-ass. More features like this that make the car feel like a fighter jet, please.

mmariani• 14 years ago

Considering the close relationship between Mercedes and Tesla these features could be in the next Model S. Awesome!

martinced• 14 years ago

It may be just me but I think that people who can't correctly park have nothing to do on the road, no matter how advanced the car... Unless it's a fully automated car, where there's no driver at all.

And here that's not the case: a grandpa in a class S killed 5 workers on a french highway some time ago. Cars full of gadgets assisting people who should never have been driving or who shouldn't be driving anymore are only going to give these a false sense of security.

Also : when you brake you always must take into account what's going behind you, not just what's in front. Sometimes it's better to hit the car in front of you to give a little more room to the semi coming behind that is otherwise going to ruin your Class S and your life. How does a car applying stronger braking when you didn't brake enough to its taste deals with that?

Just as user 'bambax' wrote: a fully automated car with no driver would be great (but we probably won't have it widely deployed before a few decades) but a car trying to 'tell me how to drive' is not that great of an idea.

With all these gizmos starting to widely appear in cars I'm pretty sure that soon the Wikipedia list of computer bugs that ruined human lives is going to get way longer...

SandB0x• 14 years ago

This is terrible advice. If you need to make an emergency stop to avoid hitting an object in front of you, it's madness to try and assess whether you should "give a little more room" to a car behind you. If you waste a second on this kind of decision you're much more likely to die from hitting the object in front of you at a much greater speed.

The car behind you should be leaving enough distance to account for their reaction time in an emergency, and while you are driving normally you should be assessing the situation behind you and making sure you're not being tail-gated.

philwelch4• 14 years ago

This is why rear end accidents are always the fault of the following vehicle. (This is also the oldest trick in the book when it comes to insurance fraud--slam on the brakes when you get tailgated, claim you saw an animal dart across the road, and collect.)

stusmith19772• 14 years ago

Agreed. As I understand it, these automatics kick in when there's a certainty of a crash ahead if no action is taken. In those circumstances, it's better to avoid the certain crash and take a risk on a uncertain shunt from behind.

On a similar note, in the UK, where most people have manual gearboxes, the advice for an emergency stop used to be to jump on the clutch and the brake, to prevent stalling. Nowadays you're taught just to stamp on the brake: in an emergency, who cares if you stall? Pushing the clutch can lead to the car "surging" if going downhill, so why risk it?

randallsquared• 14 years ago

while you are driving normally you should be assessing the situation behind you and making sure you're not being tail-gated.

If you are being tail-gated, there's not much you can do about it. You speed up; they speed up. You slow down; they honk and go around and then the car behind them tail-gates you.

One of my biggest worries about my commute (when I drive instead of taking the train, typically once a week) is that there is no way to keep enough space in front of me that I can react to full braking. If I leave that much space between me and the car in front of me, another car will move into the "open" spot. Automatic braking might well help considerably.

TallGuyShort• 14 years ago

I agree and I think it's worth pointing out that this happens in the software industry too. Online banking has become so easy that people are managing their finances on line with absolutely no understanding of how insecure email is or what an SSL error means.

netcan• 14 years ago

This sounds horrible to me.

DanBlake• 14 years ago

My last car was a S - http://i.imgur.com/CgUI3.jpg

The nightvision was almost useless (visibility better from lights) and distonic was very buggy. I did not use either after a few attempts.

At a certain point, adding too much tech can become a distraction. The cockpit of that car is already extremely button laden and there is this entire command system as well. Don't get me wrong, its awesome. Its just a lot of the features are fluff vs useful.

ams6110• 14 years ago

The problem for high-line car makers is that there's little more to be done in the basic areas. The only place left to differentiate (besides raw horsepower) is in the gadgets.

chiph• 14 years ago

All the latest tech from Mercedes has it's first appearance in the S-Class.

As a result, another name for S-Class owners is "Beta Testers" :)

nicholassmith• 14 years ago

When I was in University I did a research paper for a module called Emerging Technologies. One of the suggested topics (everyone ignores suggested topics as well) was automotive tech, which interested me straight off but I focused down on safety research. Some of the stuff I heard back from car companies and research labs was mind-blowing, it's just starting to appear now in stuff like this Mercedes. Not sure if they've started getting it together or shelved it, but there was a plan for having adaptive controls based on the cars essentially becoming a large network and being able to respond to changes through the entire 'pack' of cars.

Give it a few years, I think some of the tech they'll start trickling down from luxury cars to everyday will start making a massive difference in terms of road safety and getting the car to do more of the work.

darklajid• 14 years ago

I see lots of these 'we run the lights in high-beam mode' options recently (currently in the market for a new company car, won't be a Mercedes, ever, but this crops up ~everywhere~).

Now, for a while I was driving a lowly car without auto-dimming (whatever you call that in english, technically correct) mirrors. Being sensitive to light, I was cursing every second car behind me.

This tech scares the hell out of me: Just a slightly slow reaction time in this magic machine (or maybe I'm too far away yet to register as 'being annoyed' for that machine) and I'll see significantly worse for a short while.

And ignoring that: I haven't seen anyone mentioning how these gadgets feel to motorcycles, scooter drivers, bikers or people jogging (over here it's really quite plausible to be next (walking) or on (biking) a street between towns. Do I have to drive/jog blind, because some Grandpa in a Mercedes cannot see the road with normal lights?

This is a feature that I consider braindead and totally anti-social by default. I might post an apology in 2 years from now, but from what I see on the streets: Lights turned worse for everyone but the guy behind the steering wheel (lots of cars are misadjusted or too high, xenon-super-mega LEDs turning night into day, hell I cannot even stand behind one of these oh-so-cool cars at a traffic light, because the breaking light is subjectively putting out more lumen than most lights I have in my apartment, directly into my face).

Summary: No feature, no progress in my world. On the contrary.

cuu5082• 14 years ago

It might not be perfect yet, but we can fix things! It's likely possible to tweak various threshold distances based on country specifics, laws, user preferences, and further testing.

The car can track other cars now! I expect the trend to continue: with time it will accurately track bikers, cyclists, joggers, wild animals of all sizes, stationary obstacles, holes in road etc.

Joggers and cyclists might not be as affected as one might think. They sit higher than car drivers and avoid the beam so. On the other hand, high-powered LED bike lights, 2000 lumen and around, with no optics to form a beam, can easily blind a driver...

walrus• 14 years ago

When I'm riding my bicycle at night on a street without streetlights (or with widely spaced streetlights), I can't see where I'm going if there's an oncoming vehicle. I just go straight and hope there's nothing in the way.

rsheridan62• 14 years ago

It scares me too. What happens when this car is 15 years old and the third owner is to broke to fix things when they go wrong? Will they be driving blind, or blinding everybody else?

ygra2• 14 years ago

Then the car probably won't pass vehicle inspection anymore and thus cannot be driven legally.

moe2• 14 years ago

Since this is HN I'll mention how this reminds me of the blue-LED invasion.

Of course a much less serious issue (no lives at stake), but it will never cease to mystify me why they still put these blinding blue LEDs into everything (even my toaster has them).

I don't know anyone (including non-technical people) who likes them. I know many people who put tape over them or paint them with nail polish (a great tip btw).

I've heard arguments that they look good in shops, resulting in more sales, but I have trouble believing that since everyone I know actively avoids them...

vidarh• 14 years ago

I bought a pack of 400 small round black stickers because of blue leds. For some of the leds it takes two to cover them fully, or one will dim it enough to be acceptable.

I put them on "everything"

HeyLaughingBoy3• 14 years ago

The problem isn't the color per se, it's the brightness. Blue LEDs are very efficient, and if run at the same current levels as red or green ones that used to be more popular, are insanely bright.

About 15 years ago, when blue LEDs were rare and expensive, I built a piece of equipment and decided to use one as a power indicator. As I said above, driving it with the same current (about 10 milliamps) as I was used to doing with a red LED, basically lit up the whole room. Dropping the current to a fraction of that gave it a nice, almost subtle blue/purple glow that it still maintains to this day.

I think the underlying problem is an engineer somewhere was taught to drive indicator LEDs at 10 mA and then saying, "screw it, it's good enough to ship." People just don't care about aesthetics anymore.

snogglethorpe• 14 years ago

As blue LEDs are much brighter (at least perceptually), they need to be dimmed down a lot to be reasonable in many applications.

Unfortunately when the OMG-blue-LED fad first hit, many manufacturers apparently just treated them like other colors, and didn't modify their designs to account for the brightness difference, resulting in the searchlight-in-the-eye experience.

My perception is that things seem to have gotten a bit better since, with designs being modified to make blue LEDs less blinding, or manuf.s just switching back to more traditional colors....

nollidge3• 14 years ago

> Now, for a while I was driving a lowly car without auto-dimming... mirrors. Being sensitive to light, I was cursing every second car behind me.

In my experience every car without an auto-dimming rearview has a manual-dimming one. You flip the toggle at the bottom that tilts the mirror so that a second, less reflective mirror situated behind the main one is now angled for proper use. Obviously you don't have this on the sideviews, though.

ynniv2• 14 years ago

Always high "projector" headlights have been common for a decade[1]. They use a flap to block the top half of the beam, creating a strong line below which the headlights are always full power. When a car with these headlights goes over a bump or is on a strong incline, other drivers are exposed to the full high beams. The height of the line is also adjustable, and it is often adjusted to always be too high.

[1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headlamp#Projector_.28polyellip...]

knieveltech• 14 years ago

This article produced a visceral response I don't fully understand. Throughout I was nodding and going "yeah yeah, that would be great" as each new feature was explained. By the end of the article I found myself craving a car with manual transmission, no power steering, analog dials, and about 400 horsepower. Weird?

redthrowaway• 14 years ago

Not at all. Some of us actually like driving, and the sensation of driving a car that's built for people like us. That's one of the reasons I shake my head when people in the hacker community deride those who spend their newfound wealth on cars: you'd think engineer types would appreciate beautiful machines more, but some people view a car as either a method of commuting or a status symbol, and they don't look too fondly on the latter.

whacker• 14 years ago

Its not for liking of machines. I am in favour of gun control, but that does not stop me from admiring nice weapons, and watching people enjoy themselves shooting. But that does not mean I will buy a gun for myself.

I think cars have come to be seen as an ecological dead end, and that expensive cars are a pretty heavy burden for most people. That said, renting fast cars and driving them on a free loop is not such a bad idea! :-)

yock• 14 years ago

Why can't we have both? I hope to see commoditized commuting in my lifetime. My commute from work won't be on public transport (at least, not in the traditional sense), but rather in a car that is cheap to buy, cheap to use, and fully autonomous. This leaves me to spend money that would otherwise be spent on my commuter/family/fun all-in-one car on a car that does the fun bits of driving quite a lot better.

nollidge3• 14 years ago

What's wrong with power steering? Feel like I'd be sore after an hour of driving without it.

nagrom• 14 years ago

This is a very low quality article; in fact, it's actually an advertisement! It should be marked by Wired as such. The pictures are all supplied by Mercedes, there's no opinion or consideration of the features except gushingly positive descriptions and there's no mention of any competition except to note how Mercedes are much better than them.

It's just an advert - if it was served from Mercedes.com, it wouldn't be considered for discussion, I believe.

As others in thread have noted, these 'advancements' are often counter-productive and somewhat undesirable. The S-Class is likely a desirable car for someone who must drive others around, but I wouldn't buy one for personal use.

nollidge3• 14 years ago

> It should be marked by Wired as such.

It's already marked that way by coming from Wired.

akharris• 14 years ago

About 10 years ago, I was watching a show on Discovery (back when they had shows about science and tech) talking about innovations in AI and in cars. They had a segment on technology Mercedes was testing for their trucking fleet geared towards creating large, automated convoys of 18 wheelers. This was way before anyone was talking about Google self driving cars, and was built around close proximity driving to increase efficiency and speed.

It looks like some of that work is starting to make it's way into consumer cars. I'd be curious to see how much of the tech that Mercedes develops for it's fairly massive commercial/industrial fleet ends up improving the consumer side and vice versa.

joelthelion2• 14 years ago

This is a great way to get people used to the fact that the car is getting better than them at driving. For now the system forces you to do things yourself, but when people get convinced that the car does a good job, they'll want the car to drive for them.

CrLf• 14 years ago

Then, in an emergency, some drivers won't know what to do or react erroneously, causing accidents. Just like what happens in aviation.

Will drivers have to have the same kind of training for their self-driving cars that pilots have for modern fly-by-wire airplanes?

bcoates• 14 years ago

It doesn't matter if the driver knows what to do in an accident, if they're not actively driving the car there's no chance that they could react fast enough to do anything useful. The person sitting in the "driver's seat" is just another passenger.

If all a plane had to do in an emergency was decelerate to a stop while avoiding obstacles, we would have gotten rid of pilots entirely some time ago.

joelthelion2• 14 years ago

As long as the car does, on average, a better job than human drivers, I don't see where the problem is. Sure, there will still be accidents, including some that could be avoided with an alert backup human drivers. But as long as the number is lower than the number we have today, I just don't see where the problem is.

rayiner• 14 years ago

Metro North does my commuting for me, and it doesn't cost me $50,000.

ynniv2• 14 years ago

The cheapest S-class costs twice that. I do wonder how much the first self-driving car will cost, tho.

cyanbane• 14 years ago

" It's functional at speeds between 20 and 124 mph, but don't plan on double-fisting your iPhone and venti latte on the way to work — the system detects when the driver's hands have been removed from the wheel and automatically shuts down. Lame"

Isn't this kind of the opposite approach VW/Audi is taking?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwY8BnnIh6s

Mercedes’ Next Flagship Does the Commuting for You

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