from Hacker News

Mercedes’ Next Flagship Does the Commuting for You

by sazpaz on 12/7/12, 7:20 AM with 82 comments

• by darklajid on 12/7/12, 11:23 AM

  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.

• by nagrom on 12/7/12, 1:36 PM

  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.

• by bambax on 12/7/12, 10:14 AM

  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.

• by DanBlake on 12/7/12, 10:56 AM

  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.

• by brianchu on 12/7/12, 9:28 AM

  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).

• by mixmastamyk on 12/7/12, 9:34 AM

  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.

• by nicholassmith on 12/7/12, 11:13 AM

  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.

• by frobozz on 12/7/12, 9:15 AM

  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).

• by haberman on 12/7/12, 9:34 AM

  > 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.

• by paullth on 12/7/12, 8:39 AM

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

• by knieveltech on 12/7/12, 12:07 PM

  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?

• by akharris on 12/7/12, 2:25 PM

  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.

• by joelthelion on 12/7/12, 2:39 PM

  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.

• by cyanbane on 12/7/12, 6:41 PM

  " 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

• by mmariani on 12/7/12, 10:25 AM

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

• by sami36 on 12/7/12, 9:36 AM

  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

• by rayiner on 12/7/12, 5:31 PM

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

• by netcan on 12/7/12, 10:54 AM

  This sounds horrible to me.

• by martinced on 12/7/12, 10:41 AM

  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...