The rise of infotainment from high-end gadget to everyday necessity means automakers are fitting more stuff into cars than we ever thought possible, and here’s something that feels targeted at a specific type of person. Mercedes-Benz has announced that, with the right subscription plan, you’ll soon be able to take camera-on Microsoft Teams meetings in select models. You’re pulling that face at that statement, aren’t you? I don’t blame you.
While using a Mercedes-Benz to hop on a Teams call while driving isn’t entirely new, how the app works in select new Mercedes-Benz models is changing. As the brand states:
With this update, drivers can use the in-car camera while driving, allowing other participants to see them during a meeting. Given the brand’s focus on safety, the use of the camera abides by the laws of each country and has been approved for use on the move. To minimise distraction and maximise safety while driving, the meeting video stream turns off automatically as soon as the camera is activated. As a result, the driver will never see any shared screens or slides – and the camera can be turned off at any time.
Ah, so that’s what the selfie camera in models like the new CLA is really for. It makes sense that drivers won’t be able to see anyone screen-sharing while they’re on the go because doing so sounds incredibly distracting, but camera functionality only seems helpful for those working at organizations with a camera-on policy, and even then, won’t they know you’re driving?
Of course, being available on-camera around the clock doesn’t come for free. This twist on Microsoft Teams access requires a subscription to what Mercedes-Benz calls the Entertainment Package Plus, pricing for which hasn’t been announced yet for the American market. Given that the non-plus bundle of optional data-dependent services for cars with MBUX infotainment will run you around $150 a year, it wouldn’t be surprising if the full suite of digital services for cars with the new MB.OS system may run at or above that pricing once the free trial period runs out.
I must admit, demand seems questionable, at least in this application. The only people I could really see wanting to pay for camera-on Microsoft Teams integration in their cars are C-suiters, and most high-flying all-business executives probably won’t be daily driving CLAs. Beyond that, a car is kind of like a third space for a lot of people. A place to laugh and cry and jam out and make exasperated hand gestures at the poor driving of other motorists, not a place for work to rapidly encroach on. At 70 MPH, no one can hear how badly you’re butchering that Sarah McLaughlin track. Your housemates and/or partner and/or family won’t judge you for eating Long John Silver’s if you don’t bring it home and just eat it in the car in the parking lot instead.
Don’t get me wrong, the rise of technology and the advent of flex days or even working from home offer some amazing upsides. I wouldn’t be writing this here if it weren’t for that. However, we’re rapidly losing spaces where we’re free to be unavailable, where there’s no real expectation of filing that report or sending that email right now. Should we keep the car as one of those spaces? I reckon it’s not a bad idea.
Top graphic images: Mercedes-Benz
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I use Teams to join meetings in my car all the time. It has never occurred to me that I would want to be on camera, and I certainly can’t imagine paying for it.
Now if we were talking about a rear seat passenger in an S class or 7 series? That’s a different story.
I assume there’s some overlap with people who pay for this feature, and people who pay for a dominatrix.
MS Teams is a tool provided to me through work, for work use. If I already have a paid account, I should be able to log in and use it without additional fees.
in Germany its actually very common to get a company car as a perk/ part of your compensation. that’s kind of how many Germans can ‘afford’ these very expensive German cars. Also why the reliability gremlins and cost of ownership is not really a factor because the company will pay for all the repairs or they will flip the car before it gets old enough to be a concern.
Anyway you are right the company would be paying the bill for this feature in Germany.
Will this fly globally? many people don’t ask questions they just pay. Sirus XM is probably held afloat by people who have been paying subscriptions for years and never even use it!
I believe the fee is specifically to use the integrated camera? Otherwise I assume you would just use Apple CarPlay.
that’s what i figure nothing is stopping you from using teams hands free audio only just like any other call i think the fee is just for the camera access and i guess the car’s cpu will process the call and use it’s cellular service instead of your smartphone’s.
I have been joining meetings while driving for almost 15 years now, and surely would not pay for this kind of thing. It won’t help at all. If you have to attend a meeting while driving, you have a good excuse to not use a camera.
If the company really says this is a no go, so figure out how to attend the meeting without driving at the same time.
Because sooner or later someone will think that is ok to project the meeting in the HUD because the driver will not take the eyes off the road, so it should not be illegal.
I want everyone who’s constantly going on about “X automaker has lost their way, they were cool in the 90’s but now they blah blah blah” to take a long, hard look at Mercedes Benz, because nobody has lost their way quite like MB.
Remember when Android phones back in the day would cram every feature they possibly could into a candybar shaped mass of plastic and glass? IR blasters, HR sensors, motorized popup cameras, just because they could with no regard for whether or not it was actually useful? That’s MB now. They are laying it on so thick that its cheapening the marque. They looked at piano black and said “let’s apply this vibe to the entire machine”.
The impression I get from MB is they don’t actually know why people buy cars anymore. I don’t think I’d call them bad – the EQE is incredibly smooth, for example – but they are packing in tech and bullshit without really figuring out why anyone would want it.
Except for the occasional baller SL and S class, MB has been a shadow of its former self since Sacco decided their cars needed to look like soap bars *after* 10 uses rather than new in the wrapper.
End stage capitalism at its absolute worst. Anyone who thinks this is a good idea needs to set some goddamn boundaries with their employer. I don’t have any of my work stuff on any of my personal devices and you shouldn’t either. We’re goddamn car enthusiasts for fuck’s sale, we ENJOY driving. Why let work take that from you?
When we were on vacation with my family recently my sister, who was on PTO, got called into meetings daily…and when I pulled her aside and said “hey this sucks and you don’t have to put up with it” she responded with “oh I don’t even have it bad, my coworker just had to leave her friends’ wedding ceremony to get on the call”.
This shit is not normal or okay. Tell your corporate overlords to eat a bag of dicks. If being constantly available isn’t part of the conditions of your employment (it almost never is), then don’t be! Unless you’re a goddamn neurosurgeon who’s on call and has to rush in to try to save someone’s life, let it go. Something I’ve learned after several years in a director role and getting lots of looks behind the curtain is that 99ish percent of the time or more it can wait and 99ish percent of the time whatever people are freaking out about is not actually an emergency.
Enjoy every minute of your free time, even your commutes. No one reaches the end of the line and says “gee I really wish I’d worked more”. And if your workplace doesn’t respect that then find another.
Yep. I would specify that any meetings I’m required to attend on the weekends or during periods of paid leave will be compensated at double or triple my hourly wage. If after-hours rates are good enough for HVAC techs, plumbers, and electricians, it’s good enough for me. If that became the standard, you can get bet they would become more efficient with scheduling meetings.
Unfortunately, we are indeed living in end stage capitalism, so there’s no shortage of people who will happily attend banal meetings during their personal time, just to be employed.
I was moonlighting as a locksmith and got a job offer to go full time and he said after hours jobs i got to keep a very significant portion of my labor bill and i was under no obligation to accept any job i did not feel like doing but i did have to at least pick up the phone and take the call. Ultimately i decided to keep my “day job” but there are employers who respect boundaries sorta.
I’ve seen a lot of young people (here and elsewhere) make the mistake of adding work everything (teams, email, etc.) to their personal phones without the company actually requiring it. I think for those starting out, working that first professional-feeling job, the whole being connected to work makes them feel like they’ve made it in some way.
Bad news, you haven’t. Also bad news, you’re going to compulsively check work shit on your phone, just like you compulsively check everything on your phone. If you’re always tethered to work in some way, you’re in some way, always at work. I’ve advised every new person here not to do it. They all ignore me. Then quickly pull a Gob and say “I’ve made a huge mistake”.
Related, probably half of the emails I get are people acting like something is an emergency, when in reality they just would like me to do their job for them, and not make any decisions on their own. Most of the time if you let those sorts of things stew long enough, they’ll help themselves.
I get on everyone that I supervise if they send any communications outside of regular work hours. That shit does not fly on my team. Work the hours you’ve agreed to work and not a second more. We’re all salaried so it’s not like we get overtime anyway.
I also get on people if they don’t use leave. Every now and then I’ll go on our HR software and notice folks have like 100+ hours of vacation or something. Of course I’ll never force anyone to use it, but I will bring it up in meetings and encourage them to.
We have a few people who are always teetering on the edge of burnout cliff, and typically those people are sitting on a lot of vacation time. “I don’t know what I would do with that time anyway!” being a response that well, tells you all you need to know.
Please everyone. Take your vacation. We all (for the most part) get less than the rest of the developed world to begin with.
At my current job, I negotiated vacation, not pay. I asked for and was allowed to keep the 4 weeks I had earned from my previous employer. I was happy with the pay package but would not accept just 2 paid weeks for what is definitely NOT an entry level engineering position. Now that I work remote we take trips all the time. May as well work from a beach condo for a week or two in the winter.
That’s exactly what my wife said last time we were at the beach as we were sitting on balcony responding to work emails! She mostly remote, but unfortunately, my company’s owner is old skool…butts in the seats 8-5. We were only remote briefly during Covid (didnt miss a day of work, was jealous of those who had ‘nothing to do’) and then back to office….guess where I caught Covid? None of them would admit they had Covid…only wacko liberals caught that.
Ditto. I have told people on my team to step away from the keyboard if they respond outside of working hours or when I know they’re supposed to be on PTO. Occasionally they’ll try to argue, but this is one of the few things I’m pretty militant about.
So correct – most “emergencies” aren’t. As the on call mtc supervisor decades ago I often waited 5 minutes before having a tech respond to a call. About 70% of the time a call was followed up with a “never mind, we figured it out” within 5 minutes. Saved all of us a LOT of aggravation. The key was knowing what was a true emergency.
i feel this. I would usually wait 30 minutes to respond just because the probability of “never mind we figured it out” went through the roof after about that much time. If i called 3 minutes after i got the email i would already be in the car driving there and got the call to turn around or worse make the entire trip just to be told they figured it out and forgot to call…
I was on-site working shifts. I’d always go myself before calling an electrician or millwright (who was already performing other PM work I had assigned at start of shift). I don’t want to call people off scheduled work.
this is good. should probably do some of the basics first like flipping the breaker or try a new extension cord before calling an electrician and paying all that money! I was invovled in an incident where we found out two seperate rooms were on the same breaker and having two space heaters on that circuit did not go well. I was eventually able to figure it out after calling my supervisor and getting some sort of vague layout of the breakers because there were many and it was very confusing and nothing was labeled. eventually i just found two breakers that were in the oposite direction of all the others and after switching them oh look the lights are on now!
I was limited in my actions in a union steel mill. Still, I often went first to see if the operator and I could figure it out through the HMI screens.
I’m self employed so technically no one forced me to work year-round.
My only motivation is that if I skip a day of being on 24/7, it’d be beyond hellish when I do get back on. It’d take days to just go through the email backlog, not to mention squeezing meetings and site visits in.
So yeah 24/7 no problem. If I play my cards right I can even take advantage of time zone difference and not skip a beat. I spent a week in the UK in February without losing a single billable hour.
This is my sister. My Dad rode with her to way out of town graduation. He said she was conducting scheduled consultation sessions most of the way while driving and having her son make appropriate notes. Part of being your own Boss. Time is money.
In Germany getting a company car as a perk and part of their compensation is super common so technically the car would be “company property” I have not personally seen it but this may be safer than someone proping up a phone/tablet mount on the dash so this is probably not a frivolous feature there are people with a need for this. albeit it is a very niche need. It’s getting harder for automakers to differentiate with hardware and most carmakers are turning into glorified software companies now so we are going to see more of these crazy software add ons in the future!
Well that is garbage – I have a no work policy when on PTO.
On the other hand I routinely take calls on my drive to work and drive home. That means my 45 minute commute each way is “office time” that I’m getting paid for not just me wasting 1.5 hours a day on top of the 9 hours in the office.
This is 100% correct. If you work a white collar desk job, think back on how many of these “emergincies” were actually emergencies. Unfortunately I think my generation (millenials) played a role in normalizing this. There’s a video I saw once of boomers vs. millennials asking for time off that feels accurate to me:
Millenials: Is it ok if I take Friday off three weeks from now? I’m still going to join any meetings and I will have my phone on at all times and will check e-mail every 15 minutes!
Boomers: I’ll be off for three weeks starting tomorrow.
Bommer Boss to Millenial: No, I really need you there. You need to figure something else out.
I feel like my willingness to let my work seep into my personal life is roughly proportional to how much I’m willing to let my personal life seep into my work time. The one Teams meeting I’ve taken from the car was because I was on the way home from taking the car in for maintenance, and that seems like a fair trade.
Yes Bob, that is Gretchen from HR with me. I’ve been instructed to incorporate cars in such matters.
I’ll just make pretend I didn’t read any of this. SMFH
Teams integration in Android Auto is pretty horrible as it is. No-one needs cameras on while in a car ever. I certainly wouldn’t pay for that functionality.
I do attend meetings in a car from time to time if it’s my only option, but I need to have someone else assigned to take notes and document decisions. It’s not effective. But sometime my meetings and site visits stack in ways that it’s not avoidable.
Teams is badly integrated in anything.
Teams works nicely in Android Auto? No (Can’t opinate about CarPlay, I don’t own iStuff for a while). Teams works nicely in Android? No really. Teams works nicely at least in Windows? It is in a better shape, but it still a no.
It is really impressive that MS can’t figure out somethings…
With extremely rare exception, I feel any meeting I’d be attending while driving would be a completely worthless meeting and one that should’ve never of happened. Even in the TWICE EVER I’ve received notification of a phone call that was actually important enough for me to take it, I parked the car to have the call.
The reason why this is a feature is because people have to go to so many useless meetings. Took some effort, but I got the OK to skip any meeting I didn’t deem worthy of my time. I cut my week from the 23 I’m requested for… to the 2 where I feel me showing up is worth everyone’s time. Turns out, we all get a lot more done when we’re allowed to be heads down, work, and not break our flow.
If someone forced me to attend all those meetings, they can enjoy being subjected to 110dBA of WOT induction noise as the price of me being forced to attend.
Hooray! More ways for my coworkers to ask me something that they could figure out on their own in 3 minutes or less.
I use Teams via Android Auto to take meetings and reply to messages every day. I’m paranoid enough that colleagues will hear my overly-loud BOV. The last thing I need is them seeing my goofy face as I slow-car-fast on the highway. And pay for it? Dumb.
Yeah I don’t get this either, Teams through CarPlay (and probably the same through AA) works perfectly fine, never had an issue with it on long conf calls during a commute. Now…pay for it? This is dumb as shit.
Fuck MS Teams, both behind the wheel and on the desktop.
Counterpoint: Teams and Zoom made most in-person meetings obsolete, and I can join wherever I want–walking down the street, on a plane, on the throne, etc.
Zoom, Meet, Webex, and even Chime are fine. Teams is pure internet pollution.
As a systems engineer… the last thing I need is my work life invading into my personal space more than it is already. Even if I bought this car, there is no way I’m going to pay a subscription fee to be able to hop on meetings in the car.
And that’s the “luxury experience” of owning a Mercedes or BMW these days… where you have the “luxury” of getting nickeled and dimed for stupid little things.
And where you have the “luxury” of a car maker that spends money on superficial “soft touch” surfaces that give the illusion of luxury, but are actually less durable than the “cheap” stuff. And the stuff under the skin that you don’t see (unless you look) has a lot of stupid design decisions and ill-advised shameful levels cost cutting/corner cutting that you don’t even see on an entry level Hyundai.
Case in point… Hoovies’ EQS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSGSwaoM5yE&t=1247s
I had a new, late 90s Mercedes and it was a truly awful ownership experience, with so many recurring tech/electronic issues that I got rid of it after the first year. And that was 25+ years ago, when they were simple relative to today’s cars.
The more software and unecessary crap they cram into modern cars (especially European near/luxury ones) the radically less appealing they become. Even if I had Bezos-levels of cash to burn, my interest in buying/owning most any current Benz/Audi/BMW is negligable, due to how awful it’s been to own/maintain them during most of the past couple of decades.
And don’t get me started on contemporary Volvos… I love the old ones, but they new/Chinese ones like the EX30, which seemed so appealing at first, turn out to be nightmarish mish-mashes of buggy code impacting basic functions of the vehicle.
I shake my arthritic, liver-spotted fist at all of them. 😉
I was just thinking how funny it would be if I was on a Teams call and one of the participants suddenly screamed, crashed and the car caught on fire and then a little later, sirens and an ambulance and the sounds of the jaws of life cutting through the car body and the EMS techs trying to resuscitate the driver and yelling “clear” before trying to restart his heart with a defibrillator and then hearing someone say “it’s no use, we lost him” and then hearing them call the time of death.
That would be freaking hilarious.
Suffering from anxiety and burnout? Why not try attending meetings in your car? You surely will not regret attending meetings in your car.
Seriously. I just do not want to be this accessable
Humans were never meant to be this accessible. This idea that you should be accessible by your work 24/7 is doing untold damage to brains that are wired to pick berries all day.
Far more so for adolescents, who now suddenly have to cater their image to hundreds or even thousands of people. Science is only now starting to understand how synapses get wired in this new world, and virtually none of these scientists are saying it’s a good thing, all issues considered.
My son just got his first phone yesterday, just before 9th grade. Part of why we waited was to make sure we could fully indoctrinate him against social media as a given. So far, so good.
I can’t even imagine. I was one of the last people in my generation to have grown up without constant internet access and I’m very grateful for it. I still can get sucked in if I’m not careful, but I feel like I at least have the ability to recognize when that’s happening so I can put the phone down and do something else. I can’t imagine what the future will be like with millions of iPad kids everywhere.
We waited as long as possible for the kids to have cell phones (I’m old enough my first one came it its own bag, had an antenna and plugged into the cigarette lighter), but the amount of pressure to get them phones as early as possible was amazing. both kids were 16 when they got them, and the amount of instant bombardment was pretty staggering. I just can’t imagine the difficulty of that kind of accesssability from that age. To not be able to just hop in the car, drive for a couple of hours and just enjoy the drive without the constant pull for your attention on so many meaningless things? I just feel terrible for the kids growing up in this
My wife is a teacher and has told me many stories about 12-13 year olds just acting and looking like they’re complete zombies. No energy, no ambitions/goals, no nothing, just complete husks who can’t function without an incessant dopamine feed directly to their eyeballs.
Yeah I work in a school, there’s a lot of truth to this. A sad truth, but still the truth. But who can blame them? Do many kids have had a screen shoved into their face from such a young age, it’s how they learned to interact with the world. That’s not their fault, it’s just their tragedy
To just live life without constant video and location survailance. There is no privacy anymore. No plausible deniability for stupid teen and college antics. I’m among the last to go through college before cell phones were ever present (’94-98).
Kids (and all of us) need some freedom and (at times) the ability to make and learn from bad decisions.
I would not have wanted my full college experience video and photo documented.
“The Internet never forgets” is probably the first thing we told the kids before they got phones
Our 20 yr old daughter is pretty good at being herself and ignoring social media and influencer trends. Her mom is a different story – she would be FAR happier if she got off social and Instagram entirely. Her quest for Instagram perfect in everything is exhausting to me.
She can’t comprehend how I just DGAF and ignore it all.
Popeye is the world’s greatest philosopher.
“I y’am what I y’am and that’s all that I y’am.”
My work required some crazy device permissions to access Teams on my personal device. I declined and thus don’t get bothered at home. It was like a win-win. Not a chance I’d put this on my car. Having to pay for it is just the cherry on top.
My work took away all corporate-issued phones a few years ago, and then almost immediately expected us to use personal devices (and several apps) to stay in touch. I read all the fine print and opted out legally.
My core team all have my personal number for texting, as does anyone who reads my email signature. Thankfully they use it sparingly. Well, except for the occasionally unsolicited pet pic. It annoys me, but I can live with it.
This is a really fringe use case. It would have made more sense if this was a full feature Teams when the car is parked. Or if it’s a passenger only feature, for your executive being chauffeured around by another driver.
On the bright side, copilot is pretty competent at generating meeting recaps and action items, so at least you’ll be able to fully catch up once the meeting concludes.
If the meeting is important enough to require a camera in your face, you probably aren’t actively driving, and probably should be focused on the slides, presentations, and other visuals involved.
If having to take Teams calls while on the road is the life of a Mercedes Benz owner, I’m fine being poor
“Yo Dawg, I heard you like meetings, so we put Teams in your car so you can have meetings while you drive to your meetings!”
COTD.
Yeah, no.
It’s always interesting to see who does and does not use cameras for meetings. My wife in academia uses. Purchasing group, HR, etc at my company does. Engineering…..not a chance.
So this feature which would just capture me screaming at other drivers is a hard pass for me.
Cameras-on virtual meetings are objectively weird. I don’t want to see my co-worker’s faces, and they surely don’t want to see mine.
Other than intros when onboarding or similar, I haven’t had a camera on since 2020.
That is interesting because in most of the larger corporate offices 2020 was the start of most everyone being on camera.
Prior to that we basically only had work from home on Fridays and tried to minimize meetings so people could get some actual work done because we were all in meetings throughout the week. When they did happen the camera use was spotty.
It’s also a regional etiquette thing. In Europe, even prior to the pandemic, everyone is always on camera. The US depends but mostly off-camera. Japan is almost always off-camera while Korea and Australia are on-camera.
But I am part of the Global group where I am now and we are always on-camera. The only time I find it weird is when I’m on camera and there’s no one else on camera or most everyone refuses. But then I’ve been 100% remote since March 2020 so I guess it’s just part of it now.
If it was a phone call before 2020 it’s still a phone call. Basically only my own team gets camera on.
Can confirm, nobody in engineering uses cameras if they can help it. The only people I’ve ever seen via camera on a teams call are salespeople and architects. Not surprising, as these are people who tend to want to be seen.
Engineer here, my work computer doesn’t even have a camera
Nah, I think I’ll just keep using Teams at work, but with a Mercedes CLA background.
Ideally one with some background motion, like a chase scene from a 70s cop drama. It has to repeat every 10 seconds, though.
You can be Toonces the driving cat
Toonces, look out!
If the teams jingle goes off when I’m driving and interrupts my song, I’m driving straight into the nearest ditch
I would just decline the call/invite and proceed to keep driving… especially since it’s my company’s policy to not be on a call while driving.
No, the only way to defeat Teams is full annihilation
Mercedes logic: someone dumb enough to pay for such a horrendously fugly car will pay for just about anything else too…