

Mercedes’ Next Flagship Does the Commuting for You - sazpaz
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/12/mercedes-benz-s-class-tech/?pid=2527&viewall=true

======
darklajid
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.

~~~
moe
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...

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
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.

------
nagrom
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.

~~~
nollidge
> It should be marked by Wired as such.

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

------
bambax
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.

~~~
arethuza
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
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.

~~~
arethuza
Unabridged audiobooks from Audible solved this problem for me.

------
DanBlake
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
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.

------
brianchu
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).

~~~
masklinn
> 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.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
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.

------
mixmastamyk
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
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.

~~~
mixmastamyk
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.

------
nicholassmith
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.

------
frobozz
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).

------
haberman
> 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.

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

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

------
knieveltech
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
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
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! :-)

------
akharris
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.

------
joelthelion
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
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
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.

------
cyanbane
" 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>

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

------
sami36
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

~~~
philwelch
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.

~~~
sami36
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.

~~~
philwelch
The towncar thing would be the killer app. Best way to distribute the capital
expense.

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

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

------
netcan
This sounds horrible to me.

------
martinced
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
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.

~~~
randallsquared
_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.

~~~
tomjen3
Put a switch on the break light so that you can activate it without activating
the breaks.

Next time anybody gets too close, flip the light. Watch the idiot increase the
distance between you rather fast.

~~~
prolepunk
Or you can slightly tap the brake to the point when lights come on but very
minor or no actual braking occurs, no need to mess with wires. That's called
brake check, you might do it a few times to show your agitation to the driver
tailgating you.

