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).
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.
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.
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 :) )
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....
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.
Thanks for the tip about indicating - it is a VW Golf Plus. What has surprised me is how good it is at parking between badly parked SUVs on the side of our street that doesn't really have much of a kerb. On a few occasions I've actually walked round the car and wondered what it was using as a reference point for parking - because it definitely wasn't the kerb or the cars in front/behind. Of course, maybe I'm just lucky in picking the starting point.
Comments
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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 :) )
Night vision might save your life - that's a lot of time right there!
"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....
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.
Thanks for the tip about indicating - it is a VW Golf Plus. What has surprised me is how good it is at parking between badly parked SUVs on the side of our street that doesn't really have much of a kerb. On a few occasions I've actually walked round the car and wondered what it was using as a reference point for parking - because it definitely wasn't the kerb or the cars in front/behind. Of course, maybe I'm just lucky in picking the starting point.
Parking assist is fairly useful in Europe, where there are many areas where parking spots are both rare and rather small.
Nota bene: Laws regarding driving are fairly strict in Germany, so those measures make sense in a way.