Navigation System

Yes, this Nav processor is made by Harman/Becker, not a lot of history and experience in designing Nav like Garmin or even Pioneer.

As you may already noticed, just drive there the way you want to go and the Nav will eventually adjust the route and draw a straight line to get there. Most of us usually knows one end of the route and just need help on the other end.

Not having mapping software on the PC and the ability do some preplanning is a real drawback to these factory units. Same situation for the factory Nav in my Lexus.

My high school buddy lives on a farm and I haven't driven there in 10 years. It would have been impossible to use the MB nav in terms of detail (dirt road) and useability. So for complicated route needing serious navigation, I bring a Garmin Streetpilot 2620 along.

For you and me, these are the newer Nav for MOST MB cars, for people who wanted to update their older cars to Command Nav, the best they can get are 5 or 7 years old MB nav technology after all the effort and cost. Certainly you can't find these useability issues on the brochures in the showroom.

Diesel Benz said:

I have not used Garmin but since they have so much experience, I can imagine their implementation being better than the MB one. However, aren't the car navigator map data all coming either from Navteq or Teleatlas? MB is using both. The detail of roads on the map then is simply a question of available data space. The W221 European map includes all possible small private roads at my area at lest, many are too small for the W221 to drive, any that can be driven is hardly missing.

The POI database on the other hand is very limited for my area.

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Yes, both Garmin and MB (Harmen/Becker) use Navteq mapsets for N.A. But the MB mapset are just much smaller for some reason, at least for my 2005 SLK.

The route selection logic is in the GPS firmware design so the GPS' can behave differently even with identical mapset release from mapping companies.

It seems my MB mapset (MY04-MY05 CL-, E-, & S-Class; MY05 SL- & SLK-Class) has all paved roads but no unpaved roads. May be they are worried that a sedan, roadster should not go on to an unpaved road. I wonder if an ML mapset has all the public roads that are unpaved.

I used the MB Nav to go to Wente Vineyard in Livermore, CA from San Jose on Friday and it selected the shortest route that I know of; CA84 E and didn't pointed me up I680 N then I580 E. The only route preference settings "Avoid Freeways" was not selected.

Of course the MB Nav doesn't have settings such as, "shortest route", "fastest time", "avoid U turns" etc.

Someone said that the MB Nav processor is much faster but it doesn't seemed to be true. The arrowhead still lagged and I missed a turn Friday due to this lag.

For most GPS', it is very hard to specify a particular road to take whether it is Garmin or MB. The way to do that in Garmin's case is to build a series of waypoints on the Mapsource program on the PC, build a route thru these waypoints, then download the specified route into the GPS using a USB cable. Obviously this is very hard to do sitting in the car. So and long complex route renders the MB Nav unuseable except for the most expert and persistent owner.

I used the Lexus for a trip to SF from San Jose. I went for I280 N against the Nav recommended route of US101 N. It asked me to reroute to US101 until I got to San Mateo (CA92) before it gave up and guided me on I280. I am not quite sure who builds that Nav, may be Denso.

All my older cars have a Garmin in them. They also have routing problems but not as serious. My problem is getting to know the differences in operational logic and entry methods between Garmin, MB and Lexus. That is also why Hertz (US car rental company) never use factory Nav. They only use Magellan so their staff only have one system to learn.


p.s. for that unpaved public road, try County Road 230 in Texas. It is near Schulemburg, TX.; of course for those with NA mapset. This is shown on Garmin City Navigator North America v8 but not on MBUSA U0028-0070-503 NA DVD 2005-3. It would be interesting to know whether the ML mapset has unpaved public roads.

CalifSLK said:

Yes, both Garmin and MB (Harmen/Becker) use Navteq mapsets for N.A. But the MB mapset are just much smaller for some reason, at least for my 2005 SLK.

The route selection logic is in the GPS firmware design so the GPS' can behave differently even with identical mapset release from mapping companies.

Of course the MB Nav doesn't have settings such as, "shortest route", "fastest time", "avoid U turns" etc.

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Of course MB may select only a subset of the map data from their supplier, I've seen this on cell phone navigator applications. Perhaps the W221 navi is also different from the SLK navi (no idea which one would be better over the other).

The point on the route calculation algorithm was interesting. My W221 makes odd selections close to my home. I always thought this was because of road classification on the map database, the car selects a longer route from approximately similar roads. Those roads are "of different level" according to our road numbering system, this is why I thought the map database preferred the "higher quality road". Even if the database shows our local roads differently, I have to agree that the route planning algorithm does not seem perfect.

The W221 Comand allows preference for "fastest route", "shortest route" or "dynamic route" where TMC information is used for route selection.

bear279 said:

I assure you that what I stated is the case. I entered it several times to make sure that I had not made a mistake. Beside that one street, I found several others that you could not put in the correct street number. Really a disapointing system. I have owned probably 20 MB over the last 30 years, I would say that I am a pretty good customer of them. I really like their product, I would have prefered a ML320CDI, rather than a ML350, but the wait time here is rather long, and they are not really trading well for the diesel. But, the next one I purchase probably will not have the nav system, something like the Garmin is way above the MB one.

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I'm not familiar with ML navi, or actually not too much with any of the "older" MB navis, have just been using the W221 Comand. It does not have every street number but rather in blocks of few, but I don't find this an issue.

A later product likely always has improvements on the earlier ones (other than map data which can be updated normally) and an after market product can easily be more modern than the car. However, there are a number of disadvantages too with after market ones. Remember that the integrated navi is not only using GPS like external devices normally, it also uses gyros and wheel/steering wheel sensors or what ever to be able to track position rather well when zero GPS satellites are on sight.

It tends to be a mess with external equipment, power and antenna cables, it is not everywhere allowed to keep equipment on the dash or attached to the windshield! I nice feature would be an external device that would use the Comand display, perhaps through BT (I have a phone application where the laptop display is shown through BT on the phone and I can control e.g. a power point presentation from the phone).

Coming back to the Kansas City problem, have you browsed the map and looked at the street name from the map for the street you did not find? Perhaps the map database had a spelling error for the street or something. If it really does no appear, I'd suggest you to try a W221 perhaps at a dealer, if the US maps are anything close to those we have (and I assume they must be at least as good, US had maps far before my place was covered), you should find all the small streets.

I've also had quite a few MBs but a few still to go for 20 or so. I hope you keep going ahead of me.