You don’t want to mess with kids when it comes to their playthings. Heck, you don’t even need to be a parent to understand that. One of the things they love most are those toy cars you always seem them crashing all over the house. Well, at least that’s what Mercedes-Benz believes. They also thought taking that childhood pleasure away from them would make for an interesting experiment.
Then again, we seriously think you should not take the pleasure of pure fun away from kids. Yes, trying to steer them towards learning to play an instrument, encourage them to practice sports, and eat healthily, all that, and much more they definitely need. But they also require their fair share of joy. And when you take that away, trouble appears on the horizon.
The question Mercedes-Benz is asking is not just a social experiment; it’s connected to their Brake Assist System Plus, a safety feature the carmaker is offering to their customers. To do that, they have installed super strong magnets inside toy cars and delivered them to “people with the highest safety demands: families.”
We’re not planning to ruin a good laugh because that is precisely what watching this one-minute advertorial will trigger. Instead, we’d like to talk a little a bit about the actual safety system.
The Radar-based Brake Assist System (BAS Plus) monitors vehicles ahead and optimizes the applied brake power as soon as the driver steps on the brakes, thus initiating emergency braking, if necessary. The German luxury carmaker claims sensors scan the area ahead of the vehicle and recognize dangers in a fraction of a second from the core of the BAS Plus assistance system.
Here’s how it works according to Mercedes: “Brake Assist PLUS uses the information from two radar systems. A long-range radar system under the radiator grille scans the area in front of the vehicle with a beam angle of 18° over a range of up to 200 m (since model year 2009, previously 150 m), covering up to three traffic lanes.”
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