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Mercedes-Benz previews its operating system MB.OS

media.mbusa.com

11–20 of 398 posts

Re: Mercedes-Benz previews its operating system MB.OS

#12
post #2

> The company is confident that this strategic approach to software and hardware development will be the basis for lifetime revenues as well as additional contributions. Already in 2022, Mercedes-Benz generated more than 1 billion euro in software-enabled revenues with products and services such as navigation, Live Traffic or online map updates. Get ready to pay a monthly subscription to use features that come stock…

All it needs to do is support CarPlay. Honestly car manufacturers should just let Apple do the whole car takeover. I’ve not met a stock system I liked. I’d rather it be powered by my phone.

I like the BMW and the Tesla ones. I also heard good things about the Polestar Android.

The current OS on the Mercedes looks very laggy and not very user friendly, but if they fixed these major issues it could be quite nice. The high end Mercedes has a huge oled dashboard, it’s not something Apple CarPlay supports.

Re: Mercedes-Benz previews its operating system MB.OS

#13
post #7

>Offering flexible upgrades do you want to buy the headlights DLC ($0.9 first month, then $29.9)? Y/n

I'd personally love if manufacturers actually offered upgrades on their older cars. I had an older Mercedes-Benz and I would've absolutely given Mercedes-Benz money if they had a first-party CarPlay solution for my then car.

Re: Mercedes-Benz previews its operating system MB.OS

#15
Why does the automobile industry insist on keeping these things in-house when they are clearly terrible at them? I recall an interview with a Ford manager a few years back where they were asked something about adopting Car Play and the response was something like “we have people that can write software for us, so we won’t be using that.”

Re: Mercedes-Benz previews its operating system MB.OS

#16

Yuck: > MB.OS is designed and developed in-house to retain full control You better have some world class software engineers to pull this off, a LOT of them. And retain them. If not, you better go open source. You can still retain full control with open source. Good software is the KEY to good cars, especially electric ones. Why are we inventing 100 different models of cars every year? What a waste of human potential.

I disagree. Sometimes you need to invent things yourself. Mercedes is an absolutely massive company with many subsidiary brands. This is not an automatic bad move.

Re: Mercedes-Benz previews its operating system MB.OS

#17
post #13
post #7

>Offering flexible upgrades do you want to buy the headlights DLC ($0.9 first month, then $29.9)? Y/n

I'd personally love if manufacturers actually offered upgrades on their older cars. I had an older Mercedes-Benz and I would've absolutely given Mercedes-Benz money if they had a first-party CarPlay solution for my then car.

You're effectively saying that you want more disabled features, just in case you want to upgrade your property at some point.

Re: Mercedes-Benz previews its operating system MB.OS

#18

Yuck: > MB.OS is designed and developed in-house to retain full control You better have some world class software engineers to pull this off, a LOT of them. And retain them. If not, you better go open source. You can still retain full control with open source. Good software is the KEY to good cars, especially electric ones. Why are we inventing 100 different models of cars every year? What a waste of human potential.

Ecosystems are the key, not so much in which house or how public it is built. (see: iOS) It's also a system for a car, and probably a niche one at that.

There are a few things that are relevant in Car-OS these days:

  - Ecosystems
  - Long-term maintenance
  - Integration with a phone that takes over most day-to-day interactions
  - Car should work without it
If MB.OS and BMW's version and Audi and whoever else wants to build one doesn't support CarPlay or Android Auto (or whatever their future incarnations will be), it is already irrelevant. If anything, MB.OS is about as relevant to a consumer as QNX is. Or VxWorks for that matter. (spoiler: consumer doesn't care and doesn't really want anything to do with it)

That doesn't mean that all car makers should just keep using an ancient QNX version statically forever, or whatever some OEM happens to install with the head units, but an in-house Linux distro with some vendor branding sauce really is about as relevant as blinker fluid.

Re: Mercedes-Benz previews its operating system MB.OS

#19
post #2

> The company is confident that this strategic approach to software and hardware development will be the basis for lifetime revenues as well as additional contributions. Already in 2022, Mercedes-Benz generated more than 1 billion euro in software-enabled revenues with products and services such as navigation, Live Traffic or online map updates. Get ready to pay a monthly subscription to use features that come stock…

What's the legality of hacking these things, assuming you own the car?

For example, BMW charges $18/mo to turn on heated seats you already own. Am I legally allowed to hack their software to enable heated seats w/o paying? How about installing a wire and switch and running them manually?

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