Mercedes-Benz officials told Comdex attendees this week that the company intends to differentiate future vehicles through the use of e-services. The automaker was the first ever to have a presence at a Comdex show. It is developing a series of technological firsts for automobiles, including: * Info fueling stations. Mercedes-Benz is working on in-vehicle electronic portals that would enable automobiles to upload data as they pass high-speed, short-range transmission networks located alongside highways. The networks, which would be connected to the Internet, would deliver information using Bluetooth-type transmission systems. Using those systems, drivers could be alerted to product information at stores or could download movies from rental companies such as Blockbuster Video. * Living maps. The German-based automaker said that it is planning to "greatly increase" on-board computing capacity so that each vehicle can dynamically update its global-positioning satellite (GPS) data base with changing information on traffic, weather, road conditions, lane closures and other situations. Data transmitted by highway-based systems and other vehicles would be gathered, digested and interpreted by an on-board vehicle processor that would help drivers make key decisions. * Doppler radar-based cruise control. Within the next few weeks, Mercedes-Benz will introduce the first-ever Doppler radar-based cruise control system. The system will not only control the speed of a vehicle; it will also control the distance between it and the car in front of it. Mercedes-Benz is employing an onboard Texas Instruments Inc. digital signal processor to interpret data from the Doppler radar, located at the front of the vehicle. The company, which is also the first to introduce onboard PCs, said that it will also make a major effort to add higher levels of speech recognition to its vehicles over the next two years. Although it currently uses low-level speech recognition for operation of a vehicle's radio, CD player and GPS system, its engineers intend to add natural speech recognition, text-to-speech and speech-to-text capabilities, which would allow a vehicle to read e-mail and Internet pages to drivers. Mercedes-Benz demonstrated its new electronics technologies on C-class, E-class and S-class vehicles at Comdex Fall 2000. During the first two-and-a-half days of the show, more than 3,500 attendees lined up to test-drive the new vehicles.
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