blittle

Technical question...... as I was driving home tonight in the dark ( east coast storms, etc) with tons of rain, road spray mixed with leftover salt residue, etc... I was wondering what it would be like driving the new GL with all the various radar and camera based systems?? When they can't function properly do they just shut down or do you get a bunch of false signals and reactions from the systems?? ..... I hope you don't have to manually go into the programing and kill each option when the weather turns to crap!

cookstar

At that point the vehicle will turn into a transformer , I was also wondering what happens in winter when it snows and the active lane keeping assist can not see any marked lanes?

sraza

when lanes not visible i think active lane assist tracks steering lean and vehicle in front; it appears that 14' changes add 2 stereo cameras- distronic hopefully shouldnt start acting up as the radar is likely set to capture a larger object-
for the camera, if u mean the one in the adaptive headlights- that'l go off with oncoming lighting and so it shouldnt be affected-
but i guess time will tell what it truly does- the fact that most if not all other cars in this segment dont have these features and makes it interestingly unique!
makes a great forum discussion though--

blittle

As I understand it...... you can simply turn off the cruise control/distronic system by turning the switch on the stalk.... but the active systems ( lane keep, collision prevent and active blind spot asst, continue to use the radar/camera system and as far as I know can only be "inactivated" by going into the options menu. Perhaps they are programmed to shut down when they "go blind" but if not, it would be much better to have a "master kill" button to switch it all off when conditions require it. If I had my new by now........... I would know the answer !

JimBarnhart

OK, the guy who actually has his GL to the rescue.....

Each is a little different. For Distronic, if it doesn't feel like it can see a car ahead of it while you have the cruise set, it will beep and say Distronic is now inactive and you are in a manual cruise mode. If you try to set the Distronic with bad weather it will beep and say it can't activate and you will be in manual cruise mode.

For lane keeping assist, there is a little car with lines on each side. When that is green, lane keeping assist is active, when it is white, it's inactive. It doesn't beep since it would be going on and off quite a bit on roads with some snow. I have to remark that I am amazed at how well it does find the edges of the road, even with the weather.

For collision prevention assist, and I think active blind spot assist, when the weather gets bad enough the car will beep at you and give you a message that conditions do not allow activation of safety features, or something to that effect. It will come back automatically when conditions improve.

I have never been in a situation yet where I'd had to deactivate something. I do get a collision assist warning randomly once in awhile. It is picking up something that wasn't an issue. There's another thread on that topic.

blittle

Thanks Jim! Looking forward to testing this stuff out myself! It was the extremely miserable road conditions of the last few days that got me speculating!

Dalema

I only have the standard collision assist warming (passive). It will automatically shut off sometimes when traction is too bad aka in the snow. When driving through some really hard, pouring rain around Christmas time it did not shut off.

You can read the other thread where I noted I killed it manually from the options as it kept going off for no apparent reason.

xxGenericSNxx

One of the selling points of MB's radar based autonomous cruise control versus cheaper alternatives like Toyota's laser based is that MB's works in bad weather. It'll work through rain and fog (snow I'm not sure). But from my experience if the Distronic does get deactivated, there's a message on the instrument cluster that tells you so.

JimBarnhart

Yes, I am very impressed with it's ability in bad weather. I was thinking active lane keeping would be a usable function from about April through November due to snow on the roads, but it does remarkably well.

I drove 250 miles through a driving snowstorm with really bad roads (saw many cars in the ditch). It took me about 6 hours to make the trip, so not able to get too much speed. The road had slushy snow on most of it. During that time the systems went down for maybe an hour of the total trip.

I look forward to trying it out in rain, that means spring is here. Unfortunately in Minnesota that isn't anytime soon, hopefully Puxatawny Phil the groundhog will improve the situation on Saturday.

jellies

It works in rain but not very heavy rain.

today I drove at highway speeds into a real downpour, distronic and presafe and blind spot all switched off accompanied by warning messages. About 5 minutes after the rain lightened up, they were alerted as being available again. In just "normal" rain, including water thrown into the air by trucks etc, they did not switch off.