The main screen for the iPhone version of the app (the Blackberry version is boring) looks just like a Mercedes key fob and, essentially, works the same way. Unlock/lock the car or even locate it.

The locate feature use's the car's GPS and the phone's GPS to provide instructions for how to get back to your car. And in case you're worried the wife is going to find you riding dirty, the system overrides if you're more than a mile away from the car. Philander in peace, Tiger.

Don't want the kids getting their grubby hands on your M-Class? Lock the ungrateful rats out.

The "mbrace" system isn't OnStar, Mercedes will tell you, but it's OnStar. Access all those features without having to crash your car from your phone.

Screw up your CLK because you were too busy playing on your iPhone and left the parking brake on? The system will locate the nearest dealer to help fix your car and take a million dollars off your hands.

Forget the Mercedes dealership with a staff you actually like? You can find your selling, local or preferred dealer.

You must be moderately wealthy to live by all these Mercedes dealerships.

Developed by Hughes Telematics, this is rolling out on all new models and requires a monthly subscription.

A short list of included gadgetry: A 32-inch electrically-deployed LCD, Wi-Fi, included Sony Vaio laptop, PS3, optional (and ridiculous) Vertu Constellation luxury phone and an espresso maker, all crammed into a van with 426HP. It's still a concept, so there's no price, but it's definitely good to see a totally insane luxury car tricked out without giant flames on the sides. [Serious Wheels via LikeCool via DVICE]

Called Attention Assist, the program is the result of some meticulous study by the fine folks at Mercedes. By studying the brainwaves of sleepy drivers and the physical behavior that accompanied them (like sluggish or delayed steering, for example), they were able to design a car that literally knows when you're about to fall asleep at the wheel.

When the system notices that, thanks to sensors in the steering wheel, it will sound an obnoxious alarm to startle you into consciousness. Then, as mentioned above, the display will suggest you "pause" and take a break.

Meaning, if you purchase a new E-Class when they come out in 2009, you'll probably be driving in one of the safest cars on the road. That is, until some schmuck driving a beat-up old '95 Ford falls asleep at the wheel after working three jobs and kills you. Until that day though, super safe. [Autoweek via DVICE]

Looking at how tacky and yacht-like it is, I bet they will feel at home. Plus, they will be able to watch the Wheel of Fortune while eating nachos with cheese on top of their red Mercedes. [Sightly Warped]

The system uses side-by-side pixel placement coupled with a "filtering mask." We're guessing this filtering mask is essentially the technology found for ages in lenticular printing, that fancy technology that allowed an animated Frank Thomas to knock one out of the park on your fancy baseball card.

So while the driver views the GPS, the passenger can watch The Gilmore Girls Season One DVD. And while the passenger watches the The Gilmore Girls, the driver can lean over to the passenger's seat to take a look at the mother/daughter's crazy argument of the week...rendering the technology useless. [Mercedes]

• Off-board navigation: The GPS is constantly updated, from the maps to the points of interests. It also has a satellite overview and the search language is open: you can write directions without having to follow a format. It looks like the are plugging into Google Maps for this one, although I'm not sure how well the writing will work using their navigation knob.

• Trip assist: This part is quite nice, grabbing information pertaining your planned trip from different web sources and presenting it in a useful manner. You can, for example, see the weather forecast for the trip, as well as giving you the possibility to make hotel and restaurants reservations from the system itself.

• World radio: Instead of using a normal radio, this one plugs into the web to access all the stations available. The menu gives the possibility to access radio via genre. More interesting is the idea of storing your music in a web server and accessing it through the system directly, without the need to connect an digital music player or storing things locally.

• Internet telephony: It has support for voice over IP systems like Skype.

• Web browser: They also include a web browser, in case you need to get more information than the one provided with the thin clients above.

• YouTube: For huh... hmmm. Some reason.

The navigation knob, which looks similar to the Powermate, is simpler than the iDrive 4.0. Our Jalopnik comrades will have to try it to see if their user interface approach is better or not. [Mercedes Benz]

Part of the gaff was, of course, due to that fact that there are just 60 hydrogen stations in the U.S., and only two of those are open to the public "without prior arrangement," says Reuters. Nevertheless, event promoter Catherine Dunwoody, executive director of the California Fuel Cell Partnership (a major tour supporter), was optimistic about hydrogen's chances.

"There's a hunger out there for clean, safe vehicles," Brubaker said. "The common refrain everywhere we went was 'Where do we get these cars?'" As a personal aside, I, too, would be interested in such a venture, especially if it meant large swaths of my morning commute involved hopping on the back of a truck, and having someone else do the driving for me.

More seriously, hydrogen as a major fuel source is pretty much nowhere near becoming mainstream. As the article notes, bigwig auto makers like Honda and General Motors only have plans to test a handful of hydrogen vehicles this year and next in select markets.

A best-case scenario out of the car industry has only 2 million hydrogen-powered electric vehicles on the roads by 2020.

At least there was some diversity on this cross-country trip: Cars were provided by Honda, GM, Toyota Motor Corp, Ford Motor Co, BMW AG, Daimler AG, Hyundai Motor Co, Nissan Motor Co, and Volkswagen AG. No word on those flatbeds. [Reuters]

Although we're not too sure what they're smoking over there in Germany, because in one of the other videos they claim the old way of getting directions into your car was by printing them out and handing them to your Golden Retriever, who lovingly tapes them to the car's dashboard. [Mercedes]

This way, you can plan directions before you head out (instead of spending 10 minutes punching it in while your car's running in a garage like some kind of failed suicide attempt). Plus, once you do have directions programmed into Google and Yahoo maps, you can just press the "i" button and it'll auto-fetch them. The best feature is probably having other people send you maps and directions while driving.

These are available in the S-class and CL-class starting September 5, and in all 2008 C-class cars. [News.com]

I have a thing for Chinese mobiles. All those cult cells that look like packets of fags cigarettes and Porsches. And now they're moving into retro phones. This one comes from a company called Yinke and it's an old-skool mobey but with all the newfangled stuff we consumer geeks love so much. Rather confusingly it's got a Mercedes badge on the back, but who am I to question Chinese craziness?

There's a 2 megapixel camera, MMS support, color display, pre-loaded games, and it even comes with a stand so that you can display it proudly wherever you might be. In homage to Chris Penn, it should come with a free shellsuit, gold neck chain and a DVD of Reservoir Dogs. – Ad Dugdale

Yinke to present its stand-type mobile phone M002 [Aving via "Ubergizmo]

It also has Agility Control in its steering, suspension and gearshift, giving you faster shifting and more-stable handling that's modulated according to the car's speed. But can you plug your iPod into it? Yes, with an iPod integration kit, and it also has a lot of infotainment on board, including a 4GB music server, Bluetooth, GPS navigation, and a 7-inch display, all controlled by voice commands.

The C-Class cars will roll out in late summer of this year. Now if Mercedes can just stop cranking out such lemons, this lowest-end but biggest-selling Mercedes might just help save the company's reputation. – Charlie White

New Mercedes C-Class, Officially [Jalopnik]

Mattes plopped an iMac into the backseat of this CLS. He wasn't very happy with the color matching, so he even wrapped the iMac in leather to match the interior a little better. There is a slight problem, though. He installed it directly in front of the vents. That would be fine during the summer because the air conditioning could also cool the iMac, but during the winter ... can you say overheating? – Travis Hudson

Customizer puts iMac in Mercedes CLS [Left Lane News]

Mercedes Introduces Telephone Module with Bluetooth [eMercedesBenz]

No hard news, but it looks like Mercedes will try to sell Smarts for a little under $15,000 and that it should be available next month. Sure, it looks small and dangerous, but it's surprisingly refreshing.

Smart decision to come in May [LeftLaneNews via MobileMag]

The dashboard that obsoletes all others? [Autospies Via TheRawFeed]

Dropping the word "bling" into conversation (or a column) may be as tired as "Will and Grace," but the concept of blingage has never been more blindingly alive. In what could be the long-lost eighth sign of the apocalypse, luxury wheel brand Asanti has introduced a set of diamond-encrusted 22-inch rims that cost a million bucks for a set of four. Here's the upside — they come with a free, $150,000 Bentley Continental GT. Wither, Marie Antoinette?

XM Satellite Radio is working on a system with which drivers in urban areas can find available parking spaces. Sensors embedded in private parking lots will detect whether or not a space is in use, and that data is conveyed to drivers via their navigation systems. Still, the system won't be a truly killer app until cities embed the sensors into public parking spaces. That's when we'll show up at XM's office with cake, to say the least.

Students from top auto design schools are competing to come up with the most compelling new Ferrari design. It's a contest sponsored by Ferrari and Pininfarina — "Ferrari: new concepts for the myth" — and the students are from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Tokyo Communication Arts, Coventry University School of Art and Design, and the European Institute of Design in Turin. The winners will receive an internship at Ferrari or Pininfarina.

According to our own Robert Farago, the recently redesigned Honda Civic could bet the first car designed for the vid kids, the "first mainstream motor to reflect, represent and personify the Playstation Generation s digitized automotive sensibilities." Bloop.

Ed "Big Daddy" Roth s Mysterion was once one of the most recognizable custom cars from the radical 1960s hot rod generation. But the cycloptic beast didn't stand the test of decades; the lost machine likely turned to dust in the back of some defunct SoCal garage. But one Roth fan set about to recreate the Mysterion, only with a build quality exceeding that of, say, a paper-towel holder from Target. He did it.

Not all replicists, of course, aim for perfection. Some switch media and just keep right on going. One seriously skilled carpenter from Germany, Udo Haase, carved a replica of the famed Mercedes 300SL gullwing out of pine, just for the hell of it. And we couldn't even finish that baseball-card box in shop class.

And finally, BMW will be the first to apply a new data-transfer standard to a new car. The company's next X5 will be fitted with a suspension-damping application that uses the new FlexRay high-speed data transfer system. That system, developed by a consortium of carmakers and electronics suppliers, will likely form the infrastructure of new drive-by-wire functions that will one day replace mechanical systems for acceleration and braking. The X5's use of it is a kind of soft launch, a dry run to see how close to a zero failure rate can be achieved.

[Jalopnik s The Week in Cars appears every Friday (normally, but Monday today)]