Popular Mechanics (South Africa)
Mercedes’ new “Connect Me” tech
Mercedes-benz makes a connection
Think of it as Siri or Alexa for your car. Mercedes-benz’s vision of the networked vehicle is gaining traction with the launch of its “connect me” system as standard with its cars, across the board.
All new Mercedes-benz cars built from December 2016 now come equipped with the system, which provides networked services ranging from emergency alerts to remote locking and a 24/7 concierge. South Africa has actually leapt ahead of most countries in the world in implementing this system.
Using a smartphone app, users can remotely dial up a wide variety of vehicle status reports and operate ancillaries. The company describes this kind of interaction as ushering a new era of Contextual Intelligence in which infotainment systems automatically adapt to customers’ habits, adjust to their environment and evolve with their digital lifestyle.
We spoke to local M-B product specialist Vivendren Patchiappen to find out more about Mercedes me, specifically the companion app. Popular Mechanics: What’s it used for? Mercedes-benz: Concierge services could be as basic as providing directions to the closest doctor or the nearest place to buy a shirt; directions will be sent to your head unit. It’s more personalised (than Siri) and you have an actual human to interact with. You are able to say, “I feel like having Italian” and they will find Italian restaurants.
Outside the app, there are buttons you can press for specific circumstances, such as an emergency or breakdown, to connect directly to our Service24 breakdown assistance. In the near future, they will be able to log in to your vehicle to remotely diagnose the problem.
Even at the moment, via the app your car is able to tell you when you require a service or when your brake pads are wearing low or you have low tyre pressures. If you have selected from your app a preferred dealer, the app will alert that dealer, who can contact you to come in. This also helps us with other back-end processes, such as making sure parts are available. When you sign up for the app, how do you identify the car? You key in your VIN and all its details will come up automatically. What spec on it, what wheels it has and so on. For now we insist on it being done at the dealer level upon handover; the main reason for this is security. You have got the locking and unlocking feature and this amounts to giving someone the key.
Then there’s the climate control feature, predominantly for the hybrids because they have the battery for the electric drive. You can turn it on and off before you even get to your car to turn your climate control to get your car’s interior to whatever temperature you
want, at whatever time you want. Is that kind of pre-entry climate control functionality available on the car itself, manually, or only via the app? Only via the app or the portal.
Then we’ve got a feature called Mobility. This allows you to pinpoint the current location of your vehicle. For instance, if you go to a shopping mall and you forget where you have parked your car, it will give you step-by-step navigation to your car. So it’s about more than just the car? It’s about mobility? Correct. Integrating multiple modes of transport; for example, if you parked at a station and you need to navigate to where you need to go. Before travelling, if you want to go to Sandton City, to the H&M store, first you can send the location from your phone to the car’s head unit while sitting at your desk. Once you have driven there you can have the routing sent back to your phone for last-mile capability, so you can walk there. In some buildings, mapping companies have already mapped certain levels; most of your airports are mapped.
Then there’s geofencing, which I find really fascinating. If your child is using the car and you set up a geofence around say a university, as soon as they enter or leave that area you will get a notification. For fleet solutions as well, you can set that geofence for say Gauteng. What about privacy and security issues? Because the Europeans are very focused on protection of personal information and not having someone know where they are, in Europe you are able to turn off that feature from within the head unit. In South Africa, we are much more engaged with safety and hijacking and those sorts of things, so we have requested that you are unable to turn it off inside the vehicle as the driver, but you can log on to your app or your portal and have it disabled. You have this added safety in terms of tracking.
To unlock the vehicle, you always have to key in a code. To lock it you don’t have to put in a code. We always say, treat your phone as another key. Could you have more than one smart device controlling a single car? You could have multiples, which you would have to set up after linking it at a dealer. Is it foreseen at some stage that this will be keyless? The plan is that next year we will launch it in the E-class, using NFC.
In the car itself, you drop the phone on the inductive charging mat and there is another NFC chip in there that will allow you to start the vehicle. What happens if your phone dies? We’ve got (NFC) to work even with a dead phone. Once your device is paired to your vehicle, even if your phone is dead and has no reception, it will still work. You will still have your two normal keys and this will be a third key. What about costs and optional features? In Europe you get your basic services free, as well as your SOS button and your telediagnostics. In South Africa, we have added the remote online services, which is your app with all of your locking and unlocking, all the cool features and the convenience stuff free of charge. So what’s in it for Mercedes-benz? This is purely aimed at customer (convenience) and we are looking at what the need is in South Africa.
We are taking the route taken by the software companies, the Apples and the Googles, that you don’t just come out with one end product. Every three months we have a new release on new services, in March, June, September and December.
Another good thing is we get a lot of customer feedback. We are now able to give customers a better experience. For example, we can say, this guy is opening and closing his window a certain number of times a day and we are able to see anonymised information. That’s useful for R&D. We haven’t launched this yet, but we have a programme that will allow customers to sign in to an anonymised data of vehicle specifics. How many times your window moves up and down, you select a radio station, open your sunroof. We can find out exactly how customers are using vehicles. What about data integrity and fears of their consumption patterns being known? We give you the option to opt out of the anonymised data programme. The great thing is that it fully complies with South African laws. The anonymising thing means you will only get facts of what percentage of cars do these things. You will never be able to drill down to individuals.
Probably the greatest part of the reason that this is taking so long to roll out in the rest of the world is the laws against the processing of data within the country vs processing of data outside your borders. We have made certain that we are compliant even with POPI, which isn’t fully enacted yet.
What’s good is that Germany are even more paranoid than we are! I can tell you something, in order to go against the blueprint and want to change anything or get anything out of it, it’s almost impossible. They do not allow any APIS or any access to any information. As marketing people you feel that hampers the process, but in terms of customer and data security that’s world-class. In future, manufacturers will be selling not just cars, but mobility or experiences. How do you build that competency? The NFC stuff, we only have that working with Samsung, because Apple keeps its NFC capability for its payment portfolio. There are various collaborations.
Our R&D guys work a lot with Silicon Valley.
We are one of the first car manufacturers to have Android Auto in South Africa. But Google hasn’t launched that app on to the Google
Playstore locally yet. Our cars are ready.
I have used the Android app and it’s phenomenal. In some instances, our cars are actually ahead of what the big software companies are doing. What about legal implications about remote control? Someone asked if they can turn on the air-conditioning on a normal car prior to getting into it. Now I’ve actually looked this up and there are certain laws that don’t allow a car to be idling and unattended, be it for environmental or other reasons.
On the E-class, we have Remote Park Pilot. It’s a separate app that allows you to park your vehicle in a tight spot, from the outside, within a radius of 3 metres (it uses Bluetooth). You’ve got an explore mode as well, so you can go straight forward or back. It’s also got all the sensors, so it’s perfectly safe. Our South African law says that you have to be in full control of the vehicle and it is not allowed on a public road. You are obviously only using this in parking spaces or in your garage and we do have a disclaimer on the app itself. What about potential for hacking? The system only works with our own software and head units, (minimising) chances of there being a hack. It has a downside with regard to third-party upgrading and seamless connectivity, because it is proprietary software.
We have had requests from tracking companies to ask if they could tap into our system, to actually have a full solution for them. The simple answer from Germany is, that’s not allowed. We do not have a standard for tapping into our system.
From a customer service perspective, we’d like to give them the full service offering, but from a security perspective, we’d have to say no. How does the car connect to the online network? The vehicle has an integrated SIM card from the Netherlands; it runs off the Vodacom network, roaming on Vodacom. Data consumption is estimated at about 200 MB a month and Mercedes-benz covers it completely for the lifetime of the vehicle. Having a connected audience like this can be a useful thing. There is a feature where we are looking at… we have an online shop. All of the stuff I have mentioned, you get for free for the first three years. You can renew at the online shop, which will go live at the end of this year.
We are also looking at how to integrate streaming services such as Spotify and Tunein. This could have significant implications for rear-seat entertainment, in terms of data, displays, etc. Is this something that can be retrofitted? Because it involves significant new and upgraded hardware and wiring, there is no retrofit solution for current vehicles.