michael61

My E 250 has all the assist packages. I love them.

BUT, sometimes it tries to warn me about something with a beep and I have one heck of a time figuring out what it's complaining about.

Is there any way to get it to display what the sat warning was?

The only common false positive I've noticed is when I'm turning left and there are two left turn lanes. Sometimes the car seems to think I'm changing lanes and thinks I'm about to hit the guy next to me. This happens repeatedly at certain intersections, so I assume it has something to do with the specific geometry of those intersections.

Other times the car sets off a warning beep and I look around and can't see anything wrong. The displays don't say anything either. I'm puzzled.

ttoE550

I love the assist packages too. I have experienced the left turn in two lanes issue. Another common one is when coming up on a sharpish turn, perhaps with a parked car or a guardrail or other seeming obstacle. It does not seem to realize that you will be turning to avoid it. These two explain 99.9% of the false positives I've seen.

But I don't know if you can revisit a beep cause.

E Classy

i don't have any assist packages and my pre-brake sensor sometimes warns of peripheral objects before you make the turn away from them. some roads bend and have medians with trees, etc.

it works well for real, too - i was playing with my trip stats once while approaching a stop light and it alerted to me to slow the hell down before i was to rear-end the stopped vehicles in front. my wife and i like this feature!

Live Oak

The weird beeps will drive you just plain crazy. The ones in the double left turn lane are understandable, and some others involving guard rails etc. we can also understand.

But, on rare occasions, the damn thing will beep for no apparent reason --- no other cars or objects around, no turn signal on, etc., etc.

I think Mercedes is having trouble getting good software people --- who wants to write code for a boring car when you can write cool apps for phones?

Also, sometimes DISTRONIC will shut down for absolutely no reason, out on the road, in the desert or whatever, nothing around for miles. No cop radar going. I wonder if a big grasshopper hitting the radar port in the grill can cause it?????

mleskovar

Maybe it's just a fart from bad gas? Or is that a toot

michael61

I've had the Distronic/Assist system reboot on me three times. It's rather disconcerting since it puts up a bunch of warning messages on the display. I mentioned it to the dealer at the last service and they said, yes we see it happened, but we don't know why. Not reassuring.

benyl

I find that the impending collision warning is a bit overzealous. The red triangle in the dash will flash until you hit the brakes if it thinks you are coming up to the rear of a car too fast.

Also, if you are making a lane change and accelerating to move over, it sometimes goes off thinking you are going to hit the car in front of you.

GregTR

These are all the limitations of a reactive and not pro-active system. The car has no knowledge about what you anticipate doing all it knows is what is currently happening. It simply follows Newtonian physics and assumes that unless things change you will keep going in the sam direction at the same speed and hit something. By changing things ie. braking, changing, lanes, exerting force you are doing what the system wants to you do it just had no knowledge of you planning to do those things to begin with.

I find the system working fantastically. The only time I'm not happy with it is when I'm using Distronic and the cars in front of me are decelerating at faster than 0.5G the system just throws its hands in the air and sounds the alarm. I think it is about liability of applying emergency braking autonomously. However having my own audiovisual system in my head that is anticipatory I could avoid these warnings if I'd apply brakes on my own and disengage Distronic when I see cars slowing down but what fun is that?

pdjv

If one of the warning systems beeps, and you can't tell what it is, that's a clear failure on Mercedes-Benz! I'm willing to bet Mercedes-Benz has human factors specialists involved in the design and engineering process, but someone clearly didn't follow through. An advanced warning system that doesn't provide a clear indication - one that tells a driver immediately where the alert originated - isn't worth the extra cost.

Live Oak

Well, I wouldn't go quite that far.

Neither of us knows how much effort Mercedes has expended to solve these beeps.

A random failure in a system that's composed of interrelated radar, hardware, and software, is extremely difficult to pin down, especially considering that users experiencing the failure would need to quickly bring the cars in for examination so that Mercedes can extract the stored information, if there is any (the system may not consider it a failure; it may have considered it a legitimate threat, and thus stored information only temporarily.)

So I'm not ready to yell and scream about this, nor declare Mercedes a failure.

HOWEVER, if these failures do not occur in the later model E classes with similar features, that suggests that Mercedes may have isolated the failure. If it's a software fix, I would be disappointed to find that out if it is not passed on to earlier cars as a fix. (It appears that the OP may have a 2014 model, and gets random beeps, so the issue may still elude Mercedes.)

If I have disappointments with Mercedes technology, it has to do with the amount of time technicians have to expend to update the software when they have a fix --- which is horrible. That factor causes Mercedes to avoid software updates in any way they can, which we see regularly --- if you don't come in, during warranty, with a very specific complaint that matches the specs exactly for an existing software issue, you are not going to get an update.

And I still have concerns that some fixes seem to overwrite previous fixes --- degradation.

toban

I've had the distronic cut out from time to time. The dealer has checked the system and has told me they found nothing wrong with it. In the owner's manual it does state you can sometimes experience this cutout because of external electrical interferences from time to time.


Toban