German Car Zone

Yep!! It is - and there is also a short part that shows the interior, I think…but I'm not completey sure about this…

We see the dials and GPS cover for sure, so the dash from above. However, I don't know what the interior we see with the A/C flow is. Can't see a big GPS-cover, so doesn't look like a W212...

Whoa amazing find..
still the front isnt clear enough..
But it looks like the Autobild rear lights where overdimensioned..
These look alot better

Official photos of the 2010 E-class are still a couple months away, but Mercedes is so excited about the safety technology set to appear on the new sedan (as well as on the refreshed 2010 S-class) that it flew us over for a briefing in Germany.

Hardware details of the E-class were scarce—torsional rigidity is up a claimed 30 percent and its coefficient of drag, at 0.25, will be better than the slippery Toyota Prius’s—but Mercedes continues to develop technologies that can outsmart the driver. Ulrich Mellinghoff, vice president in charge of safety at Mercedes-Benz, is happy to usher in the autonomous car: in his words, “cars that see, feel, and act for the driver.”

We’re not sure we share his elation. What’s next, cars that are incapable of exceeding the speed limit? Either way, here’s the new—and far less controversial—safety technology coming for 2010.

Attention Assist: Detecting Drowsy Drivers

Research indicates that as many as 30 percent of traffic accidents are related to drowsiness, and these are often the most catastrophic. Many automakers are pursuing systems that monitor the driver’s eye movement with a camera, but Mercedes isn’t convinced, claiming that these systems provide warnings too late, don’t work very well with drivers who wear glasses, and require additional hardware such as a camera and infrared lighting. That’s why the company has developed its own system, called Attention Assist, that’s based mostly on the driver’s steering behavior and requires only a more accurate steering-angle sensor.

To develop the system, Mercedes had more than 550 people drive some 600,000 test miles, both on actual roads and on driving simulators, many while hooked up to a skull cap full of electrodes to monitor brain activity. That way the level of drowsiness could actually be measured and then correlated to driving behavior. Attentive drivers tend to make small and nearly continuous steering corrections whereas sleepy operators make almost no corrections for a period of time while drifting off and then snap to with an overcorrecting jerk of the wheel.

In the first 20 to 30 minutes of driving, the system monitors the driver’s behavior to adapt itself to individual habits. When it determines you are too tired to drive safely, the system announces it’s time to take a break with an audible warning and a visual message that includes a coffee-cup icon.

Attention Assist will be standard equipment on the 2009 S-class and the new E-class. While we don’t doubt the system’s ability to accurately detect a drowsy driver, we do doubt that drivers will heed the warning. In our experience, we’re usually aware of our sleep deprivation, but we’d rather push on to our destination rather than pull off for a nap. And then there’s the Big Brother concern that the cops may be interested to know that a driver’s car even knew he or she was tired before causing an accident.

Pre-Safe: Now with Autonomous Panic Stops

“Pre-Safe” is Mercedes’ encompassing term for safety features that activate before a crash, such things as seatbelt pretensioning, automatic closing of the windows and sunroof, and even inflating the seat bolsters and repositioning the seat to place an occupant in a more favorable position to deal with the impending impact.

The latest wrinkle for Pre-Safe is its ability to perform a panic stop without any driver input. The system introduced on the current S-class for 2007 applies the brakes, but only with up to 40 percent of its maximum force.

Here’s a rundown of what happens before an impending crash:

At 2.6 seconds prior to an impact predicted by the system’s radar sensors, the driver gets an audible warning (this often triggers while aggressively weaving through busy traffic). The brakes are now preloaded to deliver maximum braking if the driver hits the pedal. At 1.6 seconds before a crash, the brakes are automatically applied at 40 percent (or roughly 0.4 g of deceleration), the seatbelts are pretensioned, windows and sunroof closed, and the seat bolsters inflated. At 0.6 second before impact, the system initiates a full panic stop to reduce the severity of the crash.

False activations of this panic-braking function would be an extreme no-no, which is why it waits to spring into action until just 0.6 second prior to impact. Mercedes engineers are 100-percent confident that a collision cannot be avoided at that point.

All the Rest

Mercedes’ research showed that high-beam headlights are only on about eight percent of the time. To bring better night visibility to all, the E- and S-class headlamps can automatically adjust to suit the conditions. Going a step further than current systems that simply alternate between low and high beams, these Hella headlamps adjust between the two extremes in small increments based on input from a camera to provide maximum lighting without blinding oncoming traffic. The system operates any time the turn-signal stalk is in the high-beam position.

Also new is a lane-departure warning system that uses a camera to detect if the car is deviating from its lane, similar to many other automakers’ systems. The system doesn’t actively pull the car back into its lane by applying the brakes as do some others, and thankfully the Benz’s warning is a vibration in the steering wheel and not the obnoxious beeping found on some other systems, such as Nissan and Infiniti’s.

The new cars will also have optional speed-limit detection, but it will only be available in Europe. It’s basically the same system found on the new BMW 7-series that reads speed limit signs and displays that information on the instrument cluster.

Another thing we don’t get here is the E-class’s new active hood that allows it to conform to European pedestrian-impact standards. When the three accelerometers in the front bumper determine that a person has been hit, the system electromagnetically releases a system of springs integrated into the hood’s hinges. That fires the hood upward by almost two inches, making more deformable crush space between the unlucky pedestrian and the solid surface of the engine. The system is fully reversible and simply requires the hood to be opened all the way and then shut to re-arm the springing mechanism.

2010 Mercedes-Benz E-class and S-class: Safety Technology - Car News/Latest News & Reviews/Car Shopping/Hot Lists/Reviews/Car and Driver - Car And Driver

M

This feature is also availiable for most Volvo cars and i don't really get it! Why does anyone need his car to tell him when to take a break? Who dumb can a man be?