The new Mercedes Class A sedan is as elegant as it is elegant

This may not seem particularly impressive if we consider that Class A, the automaker's cheapest luxury vehicle, also packs a more powerful four-cylinder turbo engine under the hood. But the goal of Mercedes with the A-Class was to capture the imagination of a new generation of luxury car owners: they are younger, they have more nuanced expectations of their devices, and Mercedes is keen to keep them for life. It is no wonder that the infotainment system has received so much attention.

Smartphones have set the bar higher for the kind of thinking people expect from their devices, and Mercedes seems to understand that very well. As a result, you can issue orders to class A with a simple "Hey, Mercedes". Most importantly, orders that deal specifically with the car's material are processed immediately without sending a ping to a remote server, to make sure the temperature of your cabin is just as fast as possible.

Other tasks, such as asking Mercedes to show you nearby restaurants on its spacious and central touch screen, require the car to send your query to the cloud. The class A that we tried was unfortunately stuck on the roof of a Brooklyn hotel too sophisticated and running with European software, so we could not have a good idea of ​​the hardware or software yet. That said, I jumped into my fair share of new, smarter cars (an added bonus of being one of the few Engadget NY employees with a driver's license), and few things that I've done. I've seen it compare to the thoughtful utility of MBUX. 19659002] "Hey, Mercedes" orders worked surprisingly well when auto journalists were not babbling in the back seat, and a company spokesman confirmed that no interface methods the car was locked while the car was driving. For better or for worse, it means that you – or whoever is in your passenger seat – is free to browse the web on Google Chrome while going down the I-95.