For years, Mercedes-Benz have been at the forefront of motoring innovation, they pioneered such passive and active safety features such as the crumple zone, airbags, the safety belt, ABS and brake assist. Although most of these features are standard extras in modern cars, they all trace back to early innovation at the German motor giant.
The German company are testing a new feature that, although is not something to be fitted to customers cars, if designed to assist in the testing of safety features. They have developed an automated driving system that will allow them to put cars through rigorous tests, to the letter, over and over again, something that a human test driver would not be capable of.
The control system can be mounted to the any of the Mercedes Benz range and the tests will be monitored by engineers in a control tower. The engineers can control and stop the tests at any time but the vehicles are also able to perform self checks and brake automatically if they register deviations.
The ability to reproduce exact repetitions of a test gives the ability to determine all variations can be monitored and much more accurate tests can be conducted. The system is designed to test safety features on the car that only operate in critical situations, to conduct these tests with a human driver potentially puts them at risk if the safety features are only in a test stage. The tests are a step up from computer simulation that simply test the theory of features in varying environments whereas real life testing was previously too inconsistent to gather accurate results.
The designers at Mercedes Benz claim they are committed to develop safety features that go beyond meeting public crash test standards. The Mercedes philosophy requires their tests to go considerably farther than required by regulatory standards. With more advanced testing methods, the company will be able to continue to be at the forefront of safety design innovation.
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