Imagining a car controlled by a ‘Tweet’ of 140 characters or may be less definitely seems like an automotive mirage. Well not any more, since Mercedes Benz engineers seemed to have hit the bull’s eye in designing a car system controlled via twitter. The test for this invention seemed to be unbelievable to the ones who witnessed it, as the prototype used was an expensive Mercedes Benz CL 550, rather than a more expected disposable car.
The video of the prototype car used for test makes it appear to be some sort of a gimmick due to poor shot of the car causing difficulty in analyzing what is inside, however this car does take the credit of being the first to be controlled and actually driven by twitter. The brand building effort is towards targeting the group of people that have least or no interest in cars
This automotive genius has been built for the promotional “Tweet Race” contest from Feb 2- 4 2011 to be hosted by Mercedes Benz. In the “Tweet Race” four racers will take on the challenge by driving the Mercedes Benz fueled by the tweets of people and for the extra horse power Twitter-savvy Team Coaches will do the job.
Although it is still doubtful if the Twitter users joining the contest will have direct control of the cars, however Mercedes Benz engineer Werner Scherenberg’s recent tweets do appear to be controlling commands of the prototype car used in its twitter account, such as ignition on, volume up and even the complicated ones like autobots_roll_out and back7_left85_back7. The commands can also be sent to Twitter via a smartphone, to which the car responds by moving.
“Tweet & Vroom” is the motto for Mercedes Benz and the challenge is how well it can be powered and controlled by Twitter posts. So, put on your seat belts and await the full throttle of the “Twitterverse Mercedes”.
