Is there a way to program the car to open the garage automatically when you turn into the driveway? With Tesla, you could program to autofold the mirrors and open garage door when you get close to the house

 

I don't think so. With Tesla it's kind of a necessity, because everything even simple functions such as opening the garage door or folding the mirrors are buried in some menu on the touchscreen. Audi does a similar thing where you can setup a geofence around your house and then the Homelink controls automatically come up on the touchscreen as you approach your house. To me, it's just overengineering a solution to a problem that we never had with physical buttons. Don't know if the EQS no longer has the physical Homelink buttons integrated in the mirror, but there was nothing wrong with it.

Having said that, if you do want to automate parts of your house, that's really the domain of a smart home. Then you can trigger entire routines from your smartphone or smartwatch and it's not dependent on a particular car. For example with my smart home when I pull up to my house, my iPhone prompts me and with a single confirmation it opens the garage door, unlocks the door to the house and disarms the alarm system, so I can just pull in and walk into the house. The nice thing is this works even if I walk up to the house, or ride my bike or pull up in a service loaner. No need to carry keys to the house anymore, and have to put down whatever I'm carrying to unlock the doors and enter the alarm code.

Eventually we should be able to integrate our cars with a smart home, too. MB used to have integration with Alexa, but they terminated it for now while they work on redeveloping these services for Mercedes me connect. On the other hand my phone is always with me, and I can just tap to get into my house, or do it via CarPlay or just say "Hey Siri, I'm home' and my house opens up. Similarly when I leave, one tap on the phone closes the garage door, locks all the doors and arms the alarm system, or again I just say "Hey Siri, I'm leaving".

 

Nope. There isn’t. It’s just like homelink in my other cars where the button has to be pressed.

 

I've seen a youtube video from Mercedes where the passenger requested information from her smart home and controlled things at home via voice control from a W223 rear seat. Would this have been this Alexa integration that has since been terminated? Haven't seen any talks about smart home integration lately, nothing in the manual (that I've seen) etc.

 

It's likely the announced Samsung SmartThings integration. Not sure where that stands and if it's been rolled out already in some markets.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/home/y...your-mercedes/