Mercedes S-Crash

Don't you just LOVE that new stuff?? Now I know why I never buy something the first year it comes out!! :lol: Let someone else find all the bugs!!


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2005 Seaside #6 e/etched glass

 

To quote Zapp Branigan:

"Whoopsey-daisy!"

:lol:

 

You mean like maybe a parking garage, or tunnel, or bridge?

Could be a bit limiting there.

 

What they need is a hybrid system that combines laser and radar sensors. Both have their pros and cons. In combination, such a system can avoid the aforementioned problem. Laser system is bad in rainny or foggy days, for example. However, it won't behave as badly inside structure or tunnels, where radar can't distinguish noises.

Even so, I won't pay for such a system to take over my driving.

 

Nah, when they realize the missing piece is retro-rockets that kick in at the absolute absolute last possible second before impact, it'll all fall together...

 

BMW has a similiar system where you can even set the distance you want to be from the car in front of you. I used it on a trip home from Cape Cod one time and it was pretty neat. If someone cut in front of me, the car slowed down until the distance had been reestablished.

 

wow, a car for people who are "above" braking on their own... if they ever work out those pesky bugs...

 

Sounds more like cluelessness in the operation of the cruise control, or a publicity stunt.

I read about the new S-class in the most recent issue of Road & Track, and in a sidebar describing the cruise control, it states explicitly that when an stop in excess of 0.4g is required (an emergency stop), full control is put back into the drivers hands, and the DRIVER MUST DO THE BRAKING. Braking by computer is only done for gradual deceleration. So it seems pretty easy to make the Mercedes crash into the car in front,. Just have the car in front brake hard, and the Mercedes will sound an alarm, disable the cruise control, and allow driver full control in determining best how to avoid a collision. Do nothing and you'll coast into the car in front.

So it was the fault of the testers for trying to get the system to do something that is explicitly stated as not part of its designed behavior. Makes for a good story for the uninformed though I guess.

 

From what I read it seems the radar system was having problems inside a steal-enclosed building. Having used radar for traffic enforcement I can see how it could happen but it would be less likely to happen on a bridge or in a tunnel because the radar waves would have a rout to escape and not bounce back to the antenna.

 

Just wait till you see the automatic steering.

 

I for one, would love to have an autopilot available on a car. With the hours that I work, it would be great to be able to leave work the night my vacation starts, get into the car, input my destination, and then be able to go to sleep. I'd be halfway to my destination for most trips when I woke up, and I would have gained that much more time at my destination for having fun. B)

 

A decent engineer should anticipate and design for the effects of Multipath, whether for a radar system or for an RF system. We have two such engineers at my office, and they appear to know their business.

Multipath can be an annoyance - the flutter you get on FM while driving in a city "canyon" between tall buildings - in which case little will be done to remedy. Receiver discrimination is most helpful in reducing most of the multipath.

For microwave communications, multipath can introduce troubling jitter, which adversely effects BER (Bit Error Rate), and which can then introduce large FER (Frame Error Rate). Highly compressed digital channels will either drop frames or get stuck in endless checksum failures and retransmit.

For ASW and military/defense applications, failure to compensate for terrain or intentional multipath can have disasterous consequences.

Given how critical Mercedes' new autobrake system is - drivers will EXPECT it to work - I'd wager a team of RF, electronics, and systems engineers are right now performing FMA (Failure Mode Analysis) and DMA (Damage Mode Analysis) of the event, learning all about the unanticipated effect of Multipath, and are working on a fix.

 

404 file not found?

 

Actually those are usually made of concrete, with some steel for reinforcement. Probably not an issue there.