hi All,
American C300 Sports edition with driver assist package ( worth $2,800)
my car is 2 months old and i am really confused with the collision prevention assist option. i am not sure how it works and i think that my car has a problem.

my car does not recognize any object infront of the car and rarely recognize a slower car infront of me ( happened only once or twice ) and i am 99% sure that it does not recognize pedestrians.

I also noticed when i try to read about it on the command screen manual it is showing " Collision Prevention Assit lpus currently unavailable"

my car has the front 2 sensors and back 2 sensors too, i took the car to the dealership and they told me they upgraded the software but have no idea how to check if this is working and no idea how to test this ... any help is appreciated

 

What even a brick wall 2 feet away? Thought there are 12 sensors in total, 6 on the front of the car and 6 on the rear. If I am traveling at speed following a car I get a triangle warning in the instrument cluster if I start to get too close to it. When I say too close to it maybe it is 50 yards away. It all depends how fast I am traveling.

 

nope ... i have a single car garage and a medium size drive way .. i intentionally come very close to my wife's car but it does not stop. i even tried putting 2 cones but it does not stop

 

I would strongly discourage anyone from testing the emergency brake feature. First of all, you have to be very uncomfortable close for it to function, if it didn't you would most certainly crash since it would be impossible to manually brake on time. Ive gotten it to "alert" at a distance that provided barely gave you time to manually brake to avoid a collision. The system that recognizes pedestrians and cars WILL NOT RECOGNIZE A BRICK WALL, its not meant to. It uses a rudimentary "sight" system to recognize something that looks like a car or pedestrian nothing else. It will not react to a cow, wall or anything else.
These systems are meant as a last ditch effort for the car to avoid a collision. They are not guaranteed to do anything.
The fact is they do work as advertised but "testing" them by an owner is essentially impossible and a fools errand with potentially tragic results. If you want to see how the systems are tested simply visit the insurance institute (iihs.org) to see the videos.

 

I thought you needed more than two sensors upfront and two in the rear to have collision prevention?

 

the cpa+ will not alert you if you are driving towards a wall or car if your foot is feathering the brake. It basically is there if it senses that you are coming it to fast n the car in front. It is very hard to "test it out unless you are in real driving sitiations or have a very soft object such as a couple old pillows you don't mind running over. If you do have some pillows stack them on top each other and drive towards it at 15 miles a hour. You need to be maintaining a constant speed. You should as well check the vehicle settings it can be adjusted from there, maybe its disengaged or set to a less sensitive setting.

 

watch the video here http://moba.i.daimler.com/baix/cars/...erheit_05.html

 

The "recognition" part uses the 2 cameras (not the middle one) that make the sensor suite look like a bat. The distance information is from the radar system. The reason two cameras are required is so the system can calculate depth accurately. Just as binocular vision can estimate depth better than the monocular variety. For the road following one lens is sufficient, the center one.
Again, avoid trying to test the system. There is a video on the web of some dealer morons in a Volvo dealer demonstrating the pedestrian detection system as a training demo. The result was predictable 2 of the employees get hit by the car.