The E-Class is a bit of a sneak peek into the upcoming Mercedes-Benz Operating System (MB.OS). Mercedes CTO Markus Schaefer said, “The E-Class will be a precursor in the space of infotainment. We call it the 0.8 version of MB.OS.” While the shoutout of the E-Class is apt, the reality is the upcoming MB.OS is a huge change for Mercedes, which plans to own the entire software stack, giving it control over every aspect of the vehicle. It’s a big deal for a company that sees over-the-air updates, subscriptions, and digital purchases as an integral part of its future.
The chip-to-cloud Linux and QNX-based MB.OS platform will be part of the upcoming MMA (Mercedes Modular Architecture). At a high level, QNX will handle safety and the dash cluster, and Linux will take care of the infotainment aspect. The first vehicle based on the platform will be introduced in the later part of 2024, with the vehicle reaching showrooms in 2025.
I’d love to review this new upcoming operating system from Mercedes-Benz. I’m sure David, OSAlert’ owner, is more than willing to buy me an E-Class in 2025, right David?
In all seriousness, I would love to review the operating system and UI experience of modern cars, as I feel there’s a lot of innovation and experimentation taking place in this space – some for good, and lots for… Not so good – but for obvious reasons, this is very hard to do. I’ve contemplated contacting local dealers here, but they have very little to gain from a tech site with an audience almost exclusively outside of the north of Sweden reviewing their products.
In short, I accept donations in the form of cars.
Come on, David. Thom needs an E-Class!
Most dealers will allow you to book a test drive. That’s should be enough to experience the UI.
I’ll start this by saying I am decidedly not a Fan of Tesla Co, or its Ceo. However, the update system in Tesla’s is great. However, this means that Tesla UX engineers looking for something to do update it regularly for the worse. The car you buy is now is not the car you will have next year for better or worse.
Yeah, that’s actually a _big_ deal with automatic software updates.
I hate it when I’m looking at an older version of a piece of software — either by bringing up an old computer, or looking at some old screenshot — and I’m reminded how it used to suck less, or even used to be great.
With every running instance of a specific software being kept “up to date”, it’s easy for developers to lose track on what’s they’ve been doing to it over the years.
I am not a fan of infotainment developed internally by the car manufacturers; in my experience they are pretty riddled with bugs some of which causes crashes limiting access to e.g. parking sensors. Car manufacturers think their software is a “differentiator”, but instead it is a burden to the user: internal marketplace with zero apps beside “weather” and other mostly demo apps, community with no users, on-line services which are typically supported for at best 5 years (much less then the car useful life).
On top of that, software updates requires to bring the car to an official dealers, and anyway after the car is released there will be no changes the infotainment UI or functionalities, you will only have what you see on the day of purchase.
i sincerely hope a common platform will be developed and maintained not by a single manufacturer.
How about big old Triumph motorcycles from the mid 90s, Thom? Sure, it may not have a computer, but its a system that operates, with a little coaxing.
You could really thoroughly review the use of electric neutral and indicator bulbs while doing a nice long tour of countryside pubs.
Pop over to England and its yours for the week.
I could fit a Psion 3mx with a period accurate AA road map of Great Britain to the clocks if it makes you feel any better.
2020 Subaru Outback – the infotainment was buggy from release. We got an update at the dealer last year which actually made big improvements to what it should have been since day 1. It also enabled some subsequent OTA updates (it can connect to my home wifi, plus there is the subaru STARLINK service.
As bad as touchscreens are for a driver to change radio etc, other functions got embedded that should never be.
In our previous Forester, the “x-mode” function was enabled at the touch of a button when you needed it. In our case, likely bad snow conditions. Now, I have to cycle through MORE THAN 2 screen touches to get to “x-mode”.
And things like heated seats, its just bloody cumbersome using their interface to adjust them. Touch On Full. Touch On Med. Touch On Low. Touch Off. want it on low? yay 3 more touches! (assuming they all registered, or my arm didn’t move while driving) My Sienna has a simple analog wheel that I can adjust in half a second without taking my eyes off the road.
> and the goal is to regain the infotainment real estate taken by Apple and Android with their respective mirroring solutions, CarPlay and Android Auto. “The ultimate goal is not to mirror your phone,”
Really? That’s the opposite of what I want.
By the way, last week for the first time I drove a car with Android Auto (my car is 10+ years old) and the only navigation apps that worked well were Google Maps and Waze. Neither OSMAnd nor Sygic nor HERE WeGo worked correctly or offered a satisfactory experience.
Same. I’ve already configured my phone – it uses my keyboard layout, my notifications sounds, my app preferences. What benefits do I have as a user when reconfiguring yet another device? The sounds like MB are fighting for the real estate on the expense of users.
To be fair, that’s probably the developer’s fault as they probably need to add functionality to make their app play well with CarPlay & Android Auto. QNX has been in this space for awhile but most CarPlay UI’s I’ve seen are built on Linux. So I wonder if they’re using QNX for the back end (the CAN bus, etc) and Linux for the UI. Has anyone checked with their local junkyard to see if they’ve got any of these head units on hand? I’d settle one from 7-8 years ago before the iOS an Android stuff came out.
And like all infotainment systems in cars it will not be given updates ever again once that car model is not produced, And there will almost no spares produced so in 5-10 years you will have a car with a dead screen and no longer able to access the controls for the Heat/AC etc.
That’s what makes this so awesome – they can shut down the cloud servers at any time (e.g. as soon as they start selling the next model) and don’t have to wait for any hardware to break..
Reminds me of this…
https://www.classaction.org/tesla-s-x-touchscreen-mcu-problems-lawsuits
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/09/tesla-will-refund-owners-who-paid-to-fix-main-computers-out-of-pocket.html
Obviously the flash reaching end of life versus servers going offline is a completely different cause, but regardless it’s all ends up becoming a form of obsolescence for the owner. The reason the class action succeeded in tesla’s case was because lawyers managed to frame it in terms of a public safety issue over being locked out of basic vehicle functionality like defrosting the windshields. But it is noteworthy that tesla’s official response pre class action was *not* to cover repairs and leave owners on the hook to pay up to continue using their cars due to no fault of their own.
Incidentally, this single source of failure isn’t the only reason I hate centralizing all car’s functionality into a central infotainment system. While manufacturers may try to sell touchscreen slabs as premium, honestly it does the opposite for me. Everything about it screams “cheap” next to quality tactile controls. But I’m afraid that just like everything else, the industry is becoming dominated by low costs and low quality products that are cheap to produce but very expensive to fix.