Active Lane Assist demos are easy
Crash a late model Mercedes E Class and you'll have as much as a 10 per cent reduced risk of serious injury than if you were driving a competitor vehicle, we were told by an M-B safety boffin recently.
It's a stark headline, and like all statistics warrants proper scrutiny to fully understand the implications, but we offer the claim here 'untested' in case you need to out-gun someone in the pub later.
The presumably not off-the-cuff stat was revealed during a presentation on a couple of the company's latest safety measures before we got to drive the fabulous S63 AMG.
Testing Active Blind Spot Assist...
Radar-based Active Blind Spot Assist and Active Lane Keeping Assist are becoming optionally available to all S Class buyers, and are sure to filter down the food chain sooner or later. (In fact, M-B is already involved in an EU supported venture with Bosch designed to help mass produce systems suitable for all classes of car after new EU technical standards for automotive radar are implemented in 2013.)
Presumably to discourage us from jumping straight into the S63 and lunging into innocent bystanders on the Autobahn, we were offered a chance to try the system in a controlled environment before we set off on our driving route. The set-up was a bit like rugby practise, as it involved bashing harmlessly into great big crash mats - the most interesting of which was strapped to the side of a Mercedes SUV and had an M-B Cabrio painted on its flank.
...is a bit like motorised rugger practise.
The two systems are basically a natural progression from the passive M-B systems that alert you to drifting out of your lane or when something arrives in your blind spot. With Active Assist, instead of only telling you about it, the ESP takes corrective action if you fail to do so - braking the wheels on the opposite side to gently haul you back to safety.
If it sounds potentially alarming, it isn't. In either case, the pressure coming back through the wheel is finger-tip light, and any steering intervention by the driver immediately overrides the electronics.
You can also have Active Braking...
So does it work? Well, with something like a million test kilometres under the wheels of Active Assist-equipped test cars you'd hope so. In the case of Lane Keeping, the demonstration was fairly cut and dried - drift over a solid line, and you'll feel a gentle pressure on the wheel guiding you back on track.
Because the interventions are so gentle, with Active Blind Spot Assist the system wasn't always able to prevent us swapping paint with the Cabrio on the crash mat. The point in this case, though, is that any accident that proves unavoidable will involve a less forceful impact, potentially mitigating the after-effects.
I guess whether it works in the real world, will be revealed by the next batch of statistics.
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