Mercedes has unveiled a raft of new safety features, writes MARK NICHOL
ALL WE were told before landing in Stuttgart was Mercedes-Benz had new technology to demonstrate. For the brand, 2009 marks “70 years of safety development, 50 years of the rigid passenger compartment and systematic crash tests, and 40 years of intensive accident research”.
Pardon the cynicism, but I’ve had invites to wakes that sounded more exciting; an entire day dedicated to self-congratulatory, highly methodical posturing is not my jug of weissbier.
But Mercedes is introducing a concept car and not the usual kind – an over-wheeled, fanciful marketing tool that will probably bear no resemblance to the production version. The ESF 2009 may be fanciful, but it’s also serious. And Mercedes is serious about what it means.
A series of Experimental Safety Vehicles (ESFs) were used to develop some epochal innovations between 1971 and 1974. They’re lined up in a cavernous warehouse at the Singelfingen test centre, where Mercedes safety development chief Prof Rodolfo Schoneburg is giving a speech.
Rather effusively, Schoneburg announces: “There’s a bit of Mercedes-Benz in every car on the road today”. There is some merit in his posturing; it was Mercedes that proliferated the widespread use of safety landmarks like anti-lock brakes (ABS), electronic stability control (ESC), seatbelt pre-tensioners and the airbag – all on ESFs.
But after four cars in only three years they stopped, ostensibly because Mercedes needed a decade or three to get the nascent technology into production – make it cost-effective, make it work. Now, a car without a litany of protective balloons, restrictive harnesses and anti-lock discs is no car at all; the age of the airbag, seatbelts and decent brakes has gestated. Right?
Wrong, says Mercedes – that’s what the stickered S-Class you see here is about. It’s not entirely otherworldly – current S-Class owners may already have had a taste of the predictive ‘Pre-Safe’ technology – but here, it’s linked to truly next-generation cosseting.
Pre-Safe is essentially software linked to a network of sensors that detect an imminent smash and instruct the car to take action. The production version, currently standard on S- and E-Class saloons, senses emergency braking and automatically tightens seatbelts, closes windows and sunroof and adjusts seating position for optimal airbag effectiveness. It also applies brakes automatically in the case of impending impact.
ESF 2009 takes those fundamentals and applies them throughout the car. Now that doesn’t sound very exciting. But when you see some of the stuff this thing has, it really is. Inflatable doors, anyone?
Although it’s not quite the doors, rather impact bars inside the doors, that inflate. Pre-Safe Structure is the name given to the corrugated, hollow metal beams that inflate when a crash is imminent. They’re compact and light most of the time, but hugely rigid when inflated.
Working in unison with that is Pre-Safe Pulse, a system that uses the seat bolsters to “nudge” the front occupant towards the middle of the car before a side impact, using the sideward velocity to mitigate the force of the blow. And to prevent occupants clashing heads, an airbag is deployed between the front seats. For rear passengers, the same principle is applied, but implemented using a foam pad that emerges from the rear.
Rear passenger seatbelts are equipped with airbags, which seems too simple not to have been done before. Even the standard front airbags have been given a going-over; they deploy to a certain volume, depending on the weight and size of the person on the front seats.
It will also direct you out of the path of obstacles and traffic jams, thanks to internet-based ad-hoc car-to-car networking, which means cars “talk” to each other when a hazard is detected, warning drivers to take avoidance measures – and by hazard, we also mean Garda car.
But if the hazard is unavoidable, there’s the braking bag – an airbag underneath the car, between the front wheels, that stops the car quicker by means of friction. Mercedes estimates it effectively adds an 18cm crumple zone to the front of the car at around 30mph. And there’s a spotlight function that uses infrared (already available on Mercs equipped with night vision) to sense moving objects and temporarily illuminate them.
The problem is, much of those things are irreversible, which is Mercedes’ way of saying they’ll write the car off – so they’d better be reliable, which is why none of the engineers at the Sindelfingen test centre would commit to a production date, instead using the word “hope” a lot. The reversible things like the belt bag and anti-head clashing measures are likely to appear on the next S-Class, but we’ll have to wait a while for our inflatable cars.