Mercedes-Benz and Garmin smartwatch could tell your car how stressed you are

[sincity]

German auto giant Mercedes-Benz has teamed up with Garmin to create a smartwatch that can feed important health data back to your car in order to provide you with a calmer, more enjoyable experience. 

Unveiled alongside the new, tech-enabled 2020 CLA Coupe at CES 2019, the smartwatch will be a Mercedes-Benz-branded Vívoactive 3 GPS.

The customized wearable is able to track your health data, including your heart rate and stress levels, and send that information to the car's dashboard. 

It'll then figure out how calm or stressed you are and make changes to the car accordingly, including changing the air conditioning seats, lighting and music. 

Road rage reduction

It's not just the environment within the car that'll get a mellow makeover if you're feeling stressed, but less road rage-inducing routes will also be calculated to keep you as cool as a cucumber. 

The smartwatch is essentially an add-on to the 2020 CLA Coupe with a design that's meant to go well with the new car, as well as features that enhance it's tech-enabled credentials.

As well as being able to make sense of your health data, and make changes accordingly, the new car also has a brand-new Interior Assistant feature that responds to your gestures, as well as a new and improved version of the voice-controlled MBUX infotainment system.

Garmin and Mercedes have made it clear that all of those impressive stress-reducing features won't be available at launch, but will be on their way soon. 

However, we don't yet know which cars it'll work with. We're presuming it's only those packing the latest MBUX system, which includes just the 2020 CLA Coupe and 2019 A-Class, but we'll update this story when we find out more. 

The Mercedes-upgraded version of the Vívoactive 3 smartwatch is expected to go on sale at Mercedes dealers in March 2019. And although there's been no official word about pricing, the regular version of the smartwatch costs $299 (£199.99).

• Check out all of TechRadar's CES 2019 coverage. We're live in Las Vegas to bring you all the breaking tech news and launches, plus hands-on reviews of everything from 8K TVs and foldable displays to new phones, laptops and smart home gadgets.

View the full article