Mercedes uses LEDs and a Camera to make "invisible car" for marketing

Those cars are still a little beyond my grasp -- I had a C and now a CLS -- but the wonderful thing about this tech is watching it trickle down from the top of their range down through the $32,000 C Class.

By responsiveness, I mean it takes only a light touch on the steering wheel to move it at low speeds, and a light touch on the throttle to get an impressive feeling of power.

They have a lot of steering lock, which means that you can turn the wheels pretty far to the left or right, allowing the car to be very maneuverable for it's size.

As for power - well, my daily driver is a 76 Toyota Corona. The Corona has the same smooth, comfortable ride as a Benz, but boy does it ever take a while to get moving, and it's very hard to maneuver at low speeds, like in parking lots.

My other vehicle is an 83 Kawasaki GPZ 305 - a very small displacement motorbike. It's very torquey, and from a standing start it can get up to highway speed very fast.

But once you're at highway speed, that's about as fast as it's going to go. If you find yourself riding abreast of an erratic driver in the lane beside you, with someone else behind you, you might want to accelerate away from them. As quick as the motorbike is at low speeds, it will take more seconds that you would like to drop the car beside you at highway speed.

In the benz, you can tap the pedal and pass like the other cars are standing still. And it still gets going from a standing start faster than most other cars on the road.

For the record, the car I'm thinking of when I say "the benz" is a current C300, or maybe a C63.

Some people describe a car to be fun to drive when the performance of the vehicle matches their preferences. That is why you have a segment that enjoys Ford Mustangs for their straight-line acceleration (and calls them fun to drive), and you also have another segment that enjoys the Mazda Miata for its sport-tuned suspension, short tranmission gearing (which allows the engine to stay on the powerband with less effort), and low weight (and also calls them fun to drive).

There are a thousand different ways that a car can be fun to drive. Some are not even related in any way to the actual car, but to the sentimental value that the owner puts on the vehicle.

The most fun to drive car I've ever had was a sub-compact that barely had eighty-eight horsepower. Yet it did not consume much fuel. Such attibute pushed me to find how far I could go before needing to refuel. That alone made the car fun to drive.

The Mercedes owner above values the rich set of features that his vehicle has. He seems to enjoy knowing that his vehicle is highly equipped to whithstand and accident, and is even able to reduce the chances of one actually happen. Plus I bet he loves driving past store windows, and see himself driving such a fine automobile. I know I would. =)

I like fountain pens. I process using a good steel or gold nib as a sensual satisfaction similar in degree (although not kind) to a good backscratch. Some pens are fun to write with. Some ... .

I have a 2000 Mustang GT.

If you punch the throttle you hear a monster come out of the engine and set you back in your seat, you get this interesting feeling in your chest as you rapidly gain speed, and when you finally let off, the strangest thing happens: you smile.

Cars that are 'fun to drive' for me (and it's a very subjective thing) are cars where I feel like I am a part of the car. As a driver, I'm encased in the vehicle. It does what I tell it to, how I tell it to do it. It can take corners just as fast as I like them; and I can feel the g's inside the corner.

tl;dr: I feel like I am the car

Basically, the car should "feel" responsive. When you change what you are doing (i.e. accelerating) it should respond with a lot of gusto. The trick is, not doing this when the driver doesn't want it.

But when you think about the fact that most people only drive a few cars in their lifetimes, and the first couple cars are something like a Honda Civic or a Mazda Protege, the first experience with a fine German automobile is going to be anything but bland.

Most people get new vehicles every five or ten years - I get a new car or bike every couple of months (I'm not rich, I just buy cheap and flip them for various reasons) and I worked at a dealership, so I'm just as familiar with the flaws of Benzes as the strong points. You must have a similar experience. We're just spoiled, is all.

Mercedes and BMW had several years of severe quality control issues from, oh, late 90s to 2005-6. Not across every model, and not equally for both makes, but there's a lot of evidence of issues.

During that time, Honda and Toyota were making wonderfully reliable cars. But look at the recent toyotas.

Same story for American cars. The last few years Ford has been making cars w/ the fewest defects. But perception lags.

The good thing is, there are consumer reports and other agencies that track defects per 1000 cars. I've bought 2 Mercedes cars since 2007 and they both have ranked wonderfully on the consumer reports and, anecdotally, my ownership has been entirely free of defects.

I'm not sure what you mean about "4000 a year to maintain" a car that was brand new. Yes, I do have to have the oil changed yearly, and there are other maintenance tasks at normal intervals. But $4000 a year in maintenance on a Mercedes is fiction.

Mini Coopers are cheap "premium" cars, in a sense that they are indirectly marketed as if they were mini BMWs (they are made by BMW), but they are just the equivalent of a volkswagen in terms of quality (which is pretty bad from professional experience). They are built using cheap parts, that are even too flimsy to even use (it is not an exageration, but actual experience).

Porsche is a brand that is driven by engineering, but engineering != reliability. Even though they have improved a lot in the last 5-6 years, they are not sold for their reliability, but for their performance. The Boxster is a specially good example of how not to build a cheap sports car when all you do is build premium sports cars. The best example of those shoddy quality of the Boxster (first generation) is the engine that self-destructed due to an improperly machined engine part (the case). Sadly, some 911 owners also got a bad engine with the 1999 model carrera equipped with the 3.4 engine (ddg it). The engine goes for about 12k when sourced from Porsche, not including installation.

Honda does not make cars that don't break. They have problems too. The Accord suffered from a defect in the engine block cylinders that cause it to warp the deck surface and thus make the car overheat (it required you to buy a new engine, because this was not serviceable). The S2000 has a transmission made out of glass (not really, but you get my point(it is prone to failure on the first, second and third gear grear set)).

Mercedes does have the ussual electronic gremlic (just like most European cars), because they have extremely short development cycles, and you just can't test so much stuff at once (they ship a lot of buggy hardware, if you will). One of my favorites is the C240 Kompressor, which had a supercharged engine that blew up if you used a fuel that did not meet the octane requirements. Why didn't Mercedes just let the computer retard the ignition timing to compensate for the lack of octane? Wait, they did! They just didn't do enough of it (they did not test it throughly, and they also used parts that could not withstand a simple engine backfire ( a backfire is more lethal on cars that use supercharger or turbochargers, as it sends an explosion through the intake manifold (where the supercharger/turbocharger intake is)))(this comment looks like LISP code).

tl;dr: cheap parts, cheap engineering and cheap testing that derive from extreme cost-cutting measures make most brands out there a russian roullette. Good for mechanics, but bad for owners. Though with European cars, its as if you were playing Russian roullette with two bullets instead of one.

PS.If you do get the S2000, install a transmission oil cooler to extend the life of the tramsission components. The later years with the 2.4 engine had stronger transmissions, but a lower readline (and less peaky powerband (something people loved about the first generation (because it felt like a motorcycle/F1 engine))).

=)

It's still a great ad, and I enjoyed it. Some of the secondary press coverage is terrible though (PC World: "Mercedes makes invisible car, tricky to find where you parked it"; says that if the invisibility isn't perfect, it's because the LED sheet is too low resolution.)

That would make the viable "invisible" view positions even more constrained than with the technique shown in the video.

http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...