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V5.0 DVD for W211 COMAND - First Report

prprandall51 said:
I have Linguatronic and Comand and I have not discovered any way of entering a full postcode via Linguatronic; I would be highly surprised if this were possible - I would love to hear from anyone who has succeeded in doing so.
Hi Philip,
It was me that posted the Linguatronic information. I always tend to clarify this by saying it was 'Oslo' who told me. This person is someone I hold in very high regard and he is a VERY knowledgeable person. We must all accept he is Norwegian, and resides in that beautiful country, but he was telling me it accepted full post code information in the knowledge I am a UK resident. I am thinking as I'm typing and note you can put in 'House Number' with Linguatronic?? I wonder if there was a slight confusion!

I am NOT disagreeing with you. You have Linguatronic, I don't (but I want it :))

Thanks for the very informative post and it was me that stated map data and the navigation system architecture were different issues! Incidentally the 211 did not come with COMAND when it was first produced, I believe the estate was the first 211 to have it but stand to be corrected on that point!

In the US, owners that stipulated they wanted the Navigational COMAND option when they ordered the early vehicles actually had the cars exchanged when the option became available many, many months later!

Regards,
John
 
Hi John, I have checked the Linguatronic handbook and cannot find anything about entering a postcode using the system (not even first level codes). I agree, though, that Oslo knows his stuff. It is possible that the Norwegian Linguatronic is programmed to match the capabilities of the Comand map data?

At the end of the day, you can always enter a street and house number range (exaclty matching the capabilities of Postcode support) so I never get too stressed by the absence of full postcode support.

From what you say about Comand, MB clearly had enough problems getting the original system fully QA'ed to work with the car - to the extent that they launched the car without it! (That must have been a tough decision by the managment). I guess this incedent will still be fresh in their memories and a very strong reason why they won't be making any radical changes to the Comand architecture mid-life of the model.

Philip
 
prprandall51 said:
The point that John rightly made about the DVD being more expensive than the CD systems is absolutely right. The DVDs hold map data for all of Europe and when you buy a new DVD you have to pay the licensing fee back to the map producer (in this case NavTeq) for all of those maps even if you only drive in a single country. The benefit is that you get a navigation system that can seemlessly take you from John-O-Groats to the heel of Italy in one operation. It stops people posting complaints on forums about how their navigation system can't work in more than one country at a time without endless swapping of disks, but for this privelege you have to pay more.
I'm sure that this (pan-european coverage) is true. However that's probably much more useful to people in mainland Europe than it is to people in the UK. I would wager that only a very tiny proportion of UK based MB's ever leave the UK. However it would no doubt cost MB just as much to produce country specific DVD's as it does to pay the licences, so it's probably as broad as it is long.
 
prprandall51 said:
I guess this incedent will still be fresh in their memories and a very strong reason why they won't be making any radical changes to the Comand architecture mid-life of the model.
Totally agree, I dread to think of the costs involved. I believe 25% of ALL E-class manufactured went to the US. The first models imported were mostly the E500 (No 320CDI for the first couple of years)

Totally agree about Oslo, although he was answering my UK question. The Norwegian mapping data until 5.1 was 'limited' to say the very least! :) I've always said those vikings were an uncouth bunch!! :D

John
 
glojo said:
Incidentally the 211 did not come with COMAND when it was first produced, I believe the estate was the first 211 to have it but stand to be corrected on that point!

In the US, owners that stipulated they wanted the Navigational COMAND option when they ordered the early vehicles actually had the cars exchanged when the option became available many, many months later!

Regards,
John

Correct - to a degree. If you ordered APS50 with your car, you could have COMAND retro fitted for the price of the option minus the APS50 unit. I think the time for this offer has now expired - it only applied to a specific batch of them anyway.
 
The biggest reason I would like full postcode support is to be able to navigate to business addresses - with the partial code you just get "somewhere fairly near", ditto with the street name.

Again, Tomtom takes you to the door (assuming the postcode database is right - which it sometimes isn't - not their fault though!).
 
prprandall51 said:
Regarding some of the points raised in the above posts:

When examining Comand, you have to look at the time that the car was developed to get an impression of the freshness of technology, not the date you bought the car. The 211 first appeared (I think) in 2002. This means that the Comand system specification will pre-date that by at least 1-3 years, depending on the development cycle that MB runs to. Comand is an integral part of the entire vehicle architecture, not just a navigataion system and MB are not going to re-architect the entire system in the middle of the model's lifespan. Furthermore, Comand is not new to the 211 and it may well be using an architecture that was laid down several years before the 211 even got onto the drawing board. This is the way with almost all manufacturers. Look inside a brand new X5 and admire the technology from the early 90's!

Just on that note - it take 60 months for tooling, thats 5 years, for a new car to go from concept to production. Thats assuming its approved. I was told this whilst touring the S Class production line last month (they are just about to start on the new S). Including design time its about 7 years for Mercedes. Hence the point about development lifecycle is very valid.
 
saorbust said:
Correct - to a degree. If you ordered APS50 with your car, you could have COMAND retro fitted for the price of the option minus the APS50 unit. I think the time for this offer has now expired - it only applied to a specific batch of them anyway.
Hi saorbust, I am talking the United States here and the very first 211's were supposed to be delivered with full Navigational COMAND. The option was not available and owners subsequently traded the old car in and got NEW vehicles with full COMAND at NO extra cost. The reason for this was simply because MBUSA stated it was not possible to upgrade thee first vehicles!! That is a statement I have no expert knowledge on, but the cars were definitely exchanged provided the original order form specified the Navigation option with the COMAND. (Don't forget US vehicles used to have COMAND as standard, but had to pay for the navigation option)

Regards
John
 
Thanks John.

Bet those original cars have bombed in value then.......
 

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