It’s like Tesla Autopilot, but made by a company with a culture of safety.
There’s some debate as to when adaptive cruise control first showed up, but if you ask Mercedes-Benz, it will say in 1999 with that year’s S-Class. Instead of just keeping a set speed, radar-enabled adaptive cruise control allowed the car to react to deceleration by the car ahead, and thus was created the first partially automated car. From there, automakers added a function to keep cars in their lanes, and now we have location-aware, GPS-geofenced vehicles that, as long as the driver is paying attention, will do most of the driving—on the highway at least.
But the goal for developers of both autonomous and partially automated vehicles is to remove as much of the burden of driving from the human as possible, not just on controlled access highways but at lower speeds, on surface streets. Which is what Mercedes’ latest Drive Assist Pro has been designed to do. And after a recent demo—albeit from the passenger seat—on the streets of downtown San Francisco, it appears to be a very credible effort.
CLA gets it first
The big, powerful, comfortable S-Class is normally the standard-bearer for the latest and greatest tech Mercedes has cooked up, but not always. In December we drove the production version of its new entry-level EV, the CLA. At under $50,000, the sleek Mercedes sedan (or four-door coupé) is already available with the current version of the automaker’s Drive Assist suite, with better control of braking and deceleration. A particular improvement, which I’m not sure made the final version of our first drive report, is the way you can use the brake while adaptive cruise control is active without canceling the system.
