I`m with Jason Plato of Fifth Gear. When he tested the W221 some weeks back he did not feel comfortable in leaving the braking of the vehicle to a computer system and re-took manual control of the brakes during a manouevre to try them out using the assist plus system.
He also thought the night vision system a complete waste of space as well.
Something`s obviously gone wrong here and as the Stern intimates it is similar to the fiasco with the A Class when it was first fell over sorry... I mean launched.
Radar bounces off thingies to the car in the front, and it bounces back to the S. When you're in an enclosed building that would throw it off.
Think of the S as yourself. Your in an empty building. You say something, it echos back. Can you pinpoint the exact location of where the echo came from?
backed up by MB Fanatic
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Excellent example. Radar is a really high frequency from what I remember of my physics courses, therefore it is bound to bounce off of walls, which in this was were made of metal.
What happened here is that the radar bounced off the car in front of the W221 and was scattered elsewhere, not allowing the W221 to get a proper reading as it was picking up multiple frequenices with varying amplitudes. we called it radio interefence, and car makers test each and every car for such interefence with radar, sonar, and other RF.
Do this same test in a real world application and it will work fine.
It seems like the one poster above who mentioned the A-class got it right the first time. This is exactly as what happened to the A-class.
The S-class accident happened at speeds less than 20mph for StarTV. Mercedes set this up to demonstrate how brake assist works on a foggy day. The unit itself worked flawlessly, but failed because it was tested in a crash hall made almost completely out of steel. The system became extremely confused; it avoided the pedestrian, but slammed into all the other cars.
Mercedes-speaker Johannes Reifenrath assures everyone that the systems are fully effective and work not only in the city, country roads or freeways, but also in tunnels, on StahlbrĂĽcken and over many thousand test-kilometers of test conditions.
It`s interesting that MB have identified the problem being down to the metal construction of the hall in which the test took place.
The Stern article suggests that the test took place in one of Daimler`s own buildings namely, the crash-test hall.
It will be interesting to see how DC deals with the fall-out from this.
Personally I do not like relying on these types of systems. I can remember when the rain sensors were first fitted to DB windshields. It would be the clearest of days not a cloud in sight and the wipers would suddenly trigger....probabaly a fly splatting the screen. Then it would throw it down and ..... no response at all until the screen was awash and finally action.
Like humans, chip driven systems get confused. Unlike humans who have an ability to assess and re-boot their actions based on ever changing data I am not so confident that the chips can. Oh and there is one other thing.... these systems are also designed by humans and let`s face it we are not infallible as an inert metal construction has recently reminded the combined might of Mercedes Benz.
Remember those pics of an all Mercedes S-Class pile up that we reported on a while ago? The story was that the vehicles’ Brake Assist PLUS systems failed during a demo for a German television station. The result should’ve been a PR nightmare for Mercedes Benz, which has remained steadfastly quiet on the embarrassing event.
eMercedesBenz is reporting via Autobild that Mercedes Benz had warned Michael Spect, a journalist covering the story, that the building’s metal structure would interfere with the Brake Assist PLUS systems. Spect decided to go ahead with the demonstration and brake the cars manually to simulate the system’s effect. Mercedes people on hand allowed it and boards were placed in the path of the cars to indicate at what point the drivers should brake, but apparently the S-Class suspension is so supple the drivers never felt the boards and proceeded to plow into one another.
What’s the result of all this deception? One fired journalist, a bunch of nervous Mercedes Benz employees who allowed the test to be simulated and a somewhat vindicated piece of brake assist technology, although we still wouldn’t trust the Brake Assist PLUS system inside a metal hall filled with fog.
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