You need to pick up friends at an airport, but you don?t know where along the arrivals curb they?re waiting. You?re meeting a client, but you are unsure which entrance to use at their sprawling corporate headquarters. You?re headed to a wedding in a scenic park, but you don?t know exactly know where the ceremony will be held inside its borders. Drivers encounter situations like these every day. They have an address for their intended destination, but it?s not quite good enough to get them there. Actually, it will soon be quite.good.enough, because Mercedes-Benz has figured out a way to spare motorists those headaches.
The German automaker is partnering with a U.K. location company called What3Words, and together they?ll soon deliver more precise guidance to drivers. Engineers at  What3Words have divided the entire world into 57 trillion three-meter-by-three-meter squares. Each has been given a unique address composed of three-word combinations. Starting next spring, Mercedes-Benz will be the first automaker to incorporate the What3Words technology into its new infotainment systems, making three-word navigation a standard feature. Other automakers have used the technology in limited fashion. Land Rover has utilized it for off-road mapping in the Middle East, and Audi searched for its tagline, Vorsprung durch Technik, during a Q7 launch (that’s vorsprung.durch.technik, in What3Words speak), finding that it belongs to a patch of land in the jungles outside São Paulo...