Mercedes-Benz Advice

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Remember that giant technological leap your mobile made, about a decade ago, when it mega-morphosed from something you spoke to people on to being the kind of Smart Phone that you'd feel like an idiot without today?Well, your car is about to undergo the same kind of transformation, inveigling its way into previously unimagined corners of your world, monitoring your health and well-being and basically trying to run your life.As usual in car world, it's the Germans who will lead the way, with Mercedes-Benz already working on a new version of its hugely expensive S-Class, equipped with a 'Vitality Coach', which will ponder your pupil size, count how often you're blinking, measure your heart rate and consult with your calendar to see if you're running late for your next meeting.If the Coach - who will also follow you around when you're not in the car, via a 'Mercedes Me' app - deduces that you're tired or stressed, the good Dr Benz will activate its 'Regeneration' program.This involves the use of various scents, carefully ionising the air in the cabin, choosing soothing music and then hammering the relaxation home with one of the car's almost sensual seat massages (the hot-stone ones, in particular, can cause you to go all Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally).By using a combination of sensors and data and artificial intelligence, the car will decide what is best for you.If, on the other hand, the Vitality Coach notices you're blinking a lot and your throttle and steering inputs are a bit slow, it can initiate the Activation Program, with some Rage Against the Machine on the stereo, and one of its more pointedly percussive back poundings.It might all sound amusing, and even far fetched, but spend a few minutes with Dr Goetz Renner, the head of Mercedes' deeply German-sounding 'Fit and Healthy' program, and you realise it's as deadly serious as a Crossfit devotee."By using a combination of sensors and data and artificial intelligence, the car will decide what is best for you," Dr Renner, a psychologist by trade, explains.Making sure you feel happier and healthier when you get out of the car than you did when you got in is now an engineering goal for Benz and, in typical style, it's been scientifically measuring its success."We really have to prove there's something going on in your body or mind, that it's not just marketing," says Dr Renner, who employs a large team of physiotherapists and psychologists, as well as engineers."Before the S-Class was launched, we started doing long test drives, with customers driving our car for 500km, wired up to an ECG, measuring brain-waves, pulse, breathing, and then we'd get them to drive the same roads in our competitors' vehicles."We had to prove that your heart rate was better when you were in the S-Class, because your heart rate stands for your resource, your air consumption. So that is our engineering goal; you will be in better shape when you arrive at the end of your drive if you're in an S-Class."Where we're moving to now is being able to measure all those things without the wires - detecting stress in your body, collecting all your data, knowing if you're running late, and how much exercise you've done that morning.Speaking of how much exercise you've done that morning, Mercedes will be hassling you about that, too, even when you're not in the car."This is why we need a lot of computer power, to use all this data, and we need artificial intelligence to react."Speaking of how much exercise you've done that morning, Mercedes will be hassling you about that, too, even when you're not in the car, via an app that will provide fitness tips and tutorials.It's all part of a holistic, cloud-based ecosystem, designed to form a bond between you and your car, and the Mercedes brand."My mission for a Mercedes driver is to provide them with experiences and believe me when I say we are nowhere near the end, yet, of what we can do in terms of massage features," Dr Renner enthuses."I don't consider a human being like a clock wheel that has be lubricated to make it rotate even faster, I want to take a more holistic approach, I want our cars to provide an experience you can really feel, immediately."The whole Fit and Healthy approach is part of Benz's forward-looking CASE plan, which stands for Connected drive, Autonomous drive, Shared mobility and Electric drive (being happy at the wheel comes under Connected, apparently).Look closely at those terms and you can see just how far the company is looking into the future, with its goals of autonomous cars, powered by electricity and largely used in a car-sharing fashion.What Mercedes knows, of course, is that once all cars become autonomous, the way they drive will no longer be their USP (Unique Selling Proposition), it will be much more about the way they make you feel, which is what Fit and Healthy is really all about."Once all cars go autonomous, then the interior, the comfort, becomes more important," Dr Renner says."We want to provide quality time in the car, the things we can offer to passengers are getting wider and wider and this will be the differentiating factor."It's what our brand is all about, combining emotion and intelligence; the rational part of what we do deals with driving safely, but we're going to be about emotion too, about body and mind and wellbeing and regeneration."It's that feeling that the car cares about you, that's what we're working towards."Dr Renner says while the war on smoking has largely been won - ashtrays are no longer standard in cars after all - the next big health battle will be against people's increasingly dormant lifestyles."Sitting is the new smoking, that's what health experts are saying, and what they're trying to combat," he explains.Driving is the ultimate sitting activity, but Dr Renner's team is working on 'keeping your blood flow and muscle tension optimised'."Our lifestyle is increasingly designed to make us sit, but the human body is designed to move."This is a particular challenge for car companies, of course, because driving is the ultimate sitting activity, but Dr Renner's team is working on "keeping your blood flow and muscle tension optimised".The first step will be Motion Seating, set to roll out in the new compact A Class next year (the company's cheapest cars).This system senses when you've been sitting still too long and moves the seat cushion and seat back just enough to keep you from becoming total couch-potato mash.Mercedes is working with Phillips on developing a bespoke wearable device, which will be able to monitor your heart rate and exercise, and should also be able to open your car doors for you, and no doubt remotely set the air conditioning and music you require before you get to your garage.Dr Renner says Phillips is the company's choice because its pulse monitors are truly "medical grade" and while the ones on an Apple Watch are "fine", they're not up to Benz's standards. Ouch.What's coming next will be steering wheels that can replace the slightly dorky wearable watch by sensing your pulse (until such time as steering wheels are redundant themselves, of course), seats that can sense your stress levels, and hugely clever cameras that can monitor your blink rate and pupil dilation and movement.The first Vitality Coach will appear in an S-Class in January 2019, while some of the Fit and Healthy features will start to roll out on facelifted models in the middle of this year.This method of measuring driver drowsiness has been discussed for years, yet never actually fitted to a production car, but Dr Renner says that's about to change."Blink rate is a good barometer for drowsiness, but in the past the cameras were not ready for use in this way, but we're getting there now; you can imagine how sophisticated a camera must be to see these tiny changes in your eyes, because the resolution has to be astronomical," he says.While much of what Mercedes is discussing sounds futuristic, the first Vitality Coach will appear in an S-Class in January 2019, while some of the Fit and Healthy features will start to roll out on facelifted models in the middle of this year.While you can already choose from seven different comfort/activation/massage settings in your S-Class, the car will start making 'intelligent recommendations' to owners next year.If you think talking to your car is a novelty now, wait until it starts talking to you, and telling you what to do.

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Sounds like a trick question? You're right. Like everything else in the car world, the definition of "new" is negotiable.If you think "new" applies to the shiny four-wheeled object you're about to sign up for, that it just rolled off the production line, hasn't been driven, is packed with state of the art tech and won't be superseded for a few years, you're probably wrong. I'll explain …BirthdaysGet a car's birthday wrong and it can cost you serious money. When a car leaves the factory, it carries a build plate, which identifies the month and year it was manufactured.When an imported car arrives in Australia it is also fitted with a compliance plate, which identifies the month and year it landed and cleared customs with the relevant approvals according to the Australian Design Rules.When you buy, register and insure a new car, its model year is determined by the compliance plate date.It's often the case that an imported car is built in the year before it arrives in Australia, so the build plate will identify the car as being a year older than the compliance plate.If you're buying a new car, your friendly local dealer will point to the compliance plate as evidence of its birthday.However at trade-in time they will also have a look at the build plate, and if it's from a year earlier, that's the year they will use in valuing the car, because one year older means it's worth less.In the early months of a new year, most importers and dealers are still holding compliance-plated stock from the previous year. You'll often see it advertised in January with a discount, for the same reason — it's now one year old.Always check the compliance plate and build plate dates. If either or both are stamped with last year's date, your new car isn't really new any more, so factor this into the deal.RegistrationA similar trap applies here. In the car business, everybody from the global supremo to the sales junior at the smallest dealer has to meet targets. If they don't, they soon get to spend more time with the family.So importers and dealers will sometimes register new cars late in the year to get them included in annual sales numbers, even though the cars haven't actually been sold to real people. These cars will then be sold as demonstrators, usually with a few kilometres on the clock and often at an attractive price. That's fine but the factory warranty starts ticking as soon as the car is registered, so if a demonstrator was registered six months before you bought it, six months' warranty has already expired. It's offered to you with the balance of the warranty.Factor this into the price, or hit the dealer for the full warranty coverage, in writing.Everything old is new againIn automotive engineering terms, a brand new model usually only comes along every five to 10 years. Brand new in this context means a car with new drivetrains (engine/transmission/software) and/or the platform, the base structure of a car that determines its dimensions, configuration and other fundamentals.It may seem contradictory but styling is rarely an accurate indicator of newness.Sheetmetal is merely cosmetic, so if a manufacturer wants to recycle an old model as a new one, the oldest and cheapest trick in the book is a "facelift." This usually runs to a restyled front end, a little nip and tuck at the rear, new lights at each end, different looking wheels and extra colours on the palette. They simply change the box, not the chocolates.An exception is the Audi A4, which cloaks major technical advances in a body that looks much like its predecessors.The main factors driving new model development include ever-tightening emissions standards, fuel efficiency and such driver assistance/semi-autonomous vehicle safety tech as automatic emergency braking and smartphone integration.If you're looking at a new car to buy, do some research on CarsGuide to see how its credentials here stack up against the rest of the class.Japanese and Korean makers usually follow a relatively conservative, low-risk engineering path for their higher volume, lower priced cars, with less frequent changes and updates throughout a model's life.German makers, in contrast, tend to turn over models and introduce engineering innovation at a faster rate than the rest of the market, because (in common with Apple) they take a technology-driven approach and charge premium prices to affluent customers.The downside for those customers is that their new German car is often superseded shortly after they bought it.The latest is never the greatest for long in the car business.New is betterNot necessarily. The maxim "Never buy an early example of a new model" still holds true. A new-from-the-wheels-up car will often have a few problems, in some cases serious ones that soon cause their owners to wish they could make "that new car feeling" just go away.Examples include 2004 Ford Territory, Holden's 2006 VE Commodore and Cruze, several Benzes from the noughties, including the C, E and M-Class, Jeep Grand Cherokee, Peugeot's 2001 307 and several Audi and Volkswagen models, notably those with the DSG/S Tronic transmissions, including Q5, Polo and MkV-VI Golf.Engineering development on a new model doesn't stop when it goes into production. By the time a car has been in production for a couple of years, the manufacturer usually will have fixed most of the bugs and made other improvements in response to owner feedback and what the competition is offering.Run in to a runoutGiven makers' continuing improvements, the best time to buy a new car is just before it's about to be superseded. It's been around for a while (usually five to 10 years), it's thoroughly sorted and "in runout" — industry code for get rid of it before the new model arrives — so you'll pick up a good deal.Hyundai's current deal on the i30 is a prime example. The brand spanking 2016 model is imminent. I haven't yet driven it but I don't care how good it is, because the runout deal of $19,990 drive-away with the six-speed automatic is an absolute bargain and about $7000 off full freight.It's always worth checking where the new car you're thinking of buying is in its life cycle. If it will be superseded within a year or two, its trade-in value will take an extra hit and it's probably worth waiting until runout time, when the savings will compensate for this.If it's about to be superseded by a car that's demonstrably better in the important areas, it might be worth waiting for the new model. But bear in mind that the majority of new models aren't 100 per cent, or even 50 per cent, new at all.

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