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Mercedes-Benz previews its operating system MB.OS

media.mbusa.com

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

#161

Post by magila »

cameronh90 wrote: post #130
twroieuwro43 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contrary to all the legends of "German quality/engineering" (of which there is certainly in certain industries) I've heard that German cars were shit during the 90s. Japan OTOH seems to be very aware of how these newfangled tech can screw your reputation.

Honestly, I feel like German cars have an undeserved reputation for quality. German cars are superficially well built, quite fast, and make satisfying thunks when you close the doors. However, they are fairly unreliable, sensitive, and when they do fail, cost a lot to repair. I'll take a Japanese car any day, however, Hyundai, Volvo, Skoda, Kia, Peugeot and Ford are also better engineered than most German cars nowada…

Mercedes' reputation for reliability is mostly a legacy of the 60s and 70s. Their cars from that era were absurdly overbuilt, especially the diesel powered models. You will still find diesel MBs from the 70s on the road today, some of them having racked up 500k miles or more.

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

#162

Post by xp84 »

babypuncher wrote: post #32
qrohlf wrote: post #5

I was recently an owner of a Merced-Benz commercial van, and the software was by far the worst part of that whole experience. It had obvious race-condition type bugs when it came to the user interface layer, but most frustrating was its tendency to succumb to some kind of memory leak on long drives where the entire head unit would just lock up and crash to a black screen after 6-7 hours of being turned on. Because th…

I don't think I've ever used software provided by an automaker that I would classify as "good". Just varying degrees from "functional, but barebones and clunky" down to "so buggy and useless it's a legitimate safety hazard". As a result, I'm firmly on team "make every infotainment system a dumb terminal for your phone" and refuse to buy any car that doesn't support both Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.

I find myself torn on this:

* Traditional Automakers: Mostly as you describe, though honestly I am fond of the UI in my VW. Most others score B-D in responsiveness and anywhere from B-F in my "is this UI closer to ideal, or to a caricature of a baffling UI that no one will ever like to use?" scale.

* Apple: "No one needs physical controls for anything, and people HATE seeing any details, so let's try to get as minimal as possible because that's just elegant. Maybe just a dashboard with a your speed, as a single number, unlabeled because labels are ugly, and three dots (touch target 0.6cm) that you have to touch to access a menu to access all other features."

* Recent Automakers: "People love screens. Let's delete lots of switches to save a few dozen dollars, and stick functionality in deeply-nested menus that require you to take your eyes off the road."

I really want the $20 worth of physical buttons, knobs, stalks and switches of a traditional car, and the extensibility of the CarPlay world.

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

#163

Post by cvccvroomvroom »

bluGill wrote: post #121
BoorishBears wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Will I really be able to get replacement parts for the Sprinter when the screen or computer start to die in 10-15 years? Most likely, yes. Part of why most automotive tech lags behind the times on raw performance is guarantees around things like how long you can source a given SoC, for example. 10 years is not an uncommon manufacturing lifetime in the space, and a Sprinter is a relatively high volume car so I would…

I wouldn't count on it. I work for John Deere, and am often in discussions about some part going out of production. Sometimes we guess how many we need for the next X years and buy that many, othertimes we rewrite software for a new part. Care to guess how many boards can sit in a warehouse for many years and still have good capacitors. I can't tell you how many years, but there is always someone in these discussions…

In case anyone here weren't a farmer, John Deer is the Apple Tesla of industrial equipment with not just built-in planned obsolescence but built-in inability to self-repair or self-diagnose without proprietary equipment. Much hay has been made in R2R about John Deer's customer-hostile practices.

The harvest time sensor reset tax is why some small-time farmers stick to old and overseas equipment they can repair without a tech visit. It's not about the customer being unreasonable about NLA parts, but the modern unreasonableness of how the manufacturer impedes the customer with artificial scarcity and artificial limitations on knowledge, diagrams, diagnostic equipment, diagnostic equipment manuals, and the nature of some repair parts.

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

#164

Post by luma »

cameronh90 wrote: post #130
twroieuwro43 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contrary to all the legends of "German quality/engineering" (of which there is certainly in certain industries) I've heard that German cars were shit during the 90s. Japan OTOH seems to be very aware of how these newfangled tech can screw your reputation.

Honestly, I feel like German cars have an undeserved reputation for quality. German cars are superficially well built, quite fast, and make satisfying thunks when you close the doors. However, they are fairly unreliable, sensitive, and when they do fail, cost a lot to repair. I'll take a Japanese car any day, however, Hyundai, Volvo, Skoda, Kia, Peugeot and Ford are also better engineered than most German cars nowada…

As a former Audi owner, the old saying was absolutely true: if you can afford to buy two Audis, you can afford to own one. Absolutely fantastic vehicle until it blows up and then you are buying VW parts with Porsche price tags.

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

#165

Post by cvccvroomvroom »

deaddodo wrote: post #138
bluGill wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't count on it. I work for John Deere, and am often in discussions about some part going out of production. Sometimes we guess how many we need for the next X years and buy that many, othertimes we rewrite software for a new part. Care to guess how many boards can sit in a warehouse for many years and still have good capacitors. I can't tell you how many years, but there is always someone in these discussions…

> Care to guess how many boards can sit in a warehouse for many years and still have good capacitors. If you guys are having trouble storing boards for 10+ years with caps regularly going bad, I would highly recommend you look into a new supplier. Well-built caps should have no problem going for 25+ years in storage (especially cold). In addition, this is probably the easiest component on the board to replace. If you…

Or ditch electrolytic and tantalum caps wherever possible because they're crap. It's often possible to engineer a more expensive, reliable LR circuit for the impedance of a cheap RC one.

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

#166

Post by nforgerit »

German Software Engineer here. I'd rather chop off my left pinky than working on any software product any German car manufacturer is developing:

1) Their management hierarchies only consist of MBA suits that think short term and treat their engineers like apes in a zoo. This frequently leads to engineers actually behaving like apes in a zoo.

2) German culture is deeply based on thinking in silos. They divide everything into boxes in order to organize it "the right way" and don't understand network effects that occur if you focus on building a great (software engineering) culture. Instead, they mindlessly copy-paste whatever fancy thing they see in a silicon valley context.

3) My hypothesis of why German IT products are almost always horrible is that they're rarely thinking from customer's (or developer's!) perspective. They may be proud of some specs of their products but the overall thing is then often just a bunch of related subsystems "pragmatically" tied up with some duct tape.

They still obviously don't understand why they're being outsmarted by Apple, Amazon, Google and others. They're aggressively arrogant and rather lobby the German gov't or cheat to achieve short-time success instead of reorganizing their structures to still be leading in 10 years.

I bet, they internally expect industry leading products 2 years after launch and then will quietly kill the whole thing when they realize that their bet was insane from the beginning.

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

#167

Post by solarkraft »

oneplane wrote: post #18
ElijahLynn wrote: post #6

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 buil…

> If anything, MB.OS is about as relevant to a consumer as QNX is

QNX isn't exactly defining for an ecosystem, MB.OS probably will be.

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

#168

Post by lh7777 »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #104
qrohlf wrote: post #5

I was recently an owner of a Merced-Benz commercial van, and the software was by far the worst part of that whole experience. It had obvious race-condition type bugs when it came to the user interface layer, but most frustrating was its tendency to succumb to some kind of memory leak on long drives where the entire head unit would just lock up and crash to a black screen after 6-7 hours of being turned on. Because th…

Some Mercedes also have the bug where the sign classifiers somewhat regularly mis-read 80 as 60 for speed limits, causing cruise control to arbitrarily slam on the brakes in some parts of the country. You would think that they would catch these things with rudimentary quality control. The automotive code for many of these systems is incomprehensibly awful but the entire process of how it is made virtually guarantees…

I just ran into this issue in Montana the other day. Weird thing was that it’d sometimes read the 80 mph limit correctly, then a second or two later revert to 60. My Sprinter just beeps at me, though. No brake action if it thinks I’m speeding.

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

#169

Post by birdymcbird »

all sounds good…to be honest read some paragraphs but not whole page.

step 1 for Mercedes Benz is to make a vehicle reliable especially at their asking price.

had a mb c300. lots of oil leak after warranty period. sensors also bad, constantly complain about low coolant level, even when it good. transmission also slipping.

purchase car brand new. never abused engine..always put high octane gas..did all routine maintenance from mb dealer.

Will NEVER buy mb product. when i read about new software to me they just bunch of fancy talking clowns. have a 2012 hyundai elantra now driven by me daughter.

more reliable than mb c300. even hyundai more reliable than mercedes benz.

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

#170

Post by PebblesHD »

> …and receive offers tailored to their interests…

The day my car starts showing me advertisements of any kind is the day I take a sledgehammer to its infotainment system. For a luxury car brand to even include this in their copy they send out is a bit worrying.

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