TonyBrown
New Member
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2013
- Messages
- 18
- Car
- W213 E220d Premium with Widescreen and Driving Assistance
Having had my W213 (2016 E220d Premium, with Widescreen, and Driving Assistance) for almost a month now, I thought I’d offer my thoughts on the NTG5.5 Comand system, compared to NTG4.5 in my W204 C250. There are so many areas where it seems a real step backwards, particularly in the navigation section. I’d welcome any input telling me what I may be missing.
Before that, just to note that I’m really happy with the car, the ride and noise levels are greatly improved on my C250, the Driving Assistance and remote access/tracking/geofencing add to a truly enjoyable experience.
Comand Issues
1. It‘s slow! The displays look really nice on the widescreen display, but there is a significant lag between any entry, and something happening on the display. In most cases, it is an annoyance, but with map zooming, I find it makes the touchpad totally useless. Doing a ‘pinch’ to make it zoom is not the simplest thing, then you have to wait for a second or so to see if anything happened. If you want to zoom two or three times, the whole process takes forever, and is very distracting. Fortunately, the rotary knob is there, so you can turn the knob two or three clicks to do a big zoom in or out easily. I pity those who (I believe) will lose the wheel in the W205 upgrade out soon.
2. Address entry is also really slow, it looks like it goes online for almost everything. Originally, I thought it didn’t do full postcode entry, as it took so long to come up on the screen. I guess it depends on how good the data connection to the servers is.
3. No destination address book! I really can’t believe this is missing. You can only get to places by either entering them from scratch, or from the recent destinations list. However, unless you set the destination from a POI, it appears in the recent list just by the address, you can’t name any entry (can’t create a ‘Joe’s house’ entry). You can stick a few named destinations in the Favourites tray, but there are only 20 favourites for everything, destinations and other functions).
4. I’ve failed to find any way of seeing traffic on route, as you could with NTG4.5. (NTG 4.5 provided a simple ‘traffic on route’ text display) The little display showing overall time in traffic in minutes is really nice, but I can’t see how to easily find out where the delays on my route are. You can obviously look on the screen for the yellow or red traffic bars (incidentally I find the yellow very difficult to see against the green, much preferred the more obvious little red and yellow cars!). You can go into map pan mode, then click to see traffic in the vicinity, but this just hops around the items shown on the current display. The detail on each of these is also poor, just a word or two.
5. Waypoints seem to have totally gone. You can now set an intermediate destination, but then the arrival time is only for the intermediate destination, not the final location. I liked to use waypoints as the way of forcing a specific route. As far as I can see, setting an intermediate destination is like setting it as the final location, then setting the real final destination afterwards. Much nicer with 4.5, where you could set a waypoint, and see the effect on the final arrival time. There are obviously alternative routes available, but often they don’t offer the require option (I will know where to avoid for traffic in an hours’ time, but the route planning doesn’t)
6. The quality and/or interpretation of the map data is quite poor. We live in a rural area, and its preferred routes include roads which I would only drive down as a last resort. I’ve now stopped it going down them with avoid areas, but it still refuses to choose sensible routes. In one particular case, it will prefer going an extra 4 miles, rather than going 800 yards down a road which is much more passable than some of its preferred roads.
I accept that country roads are a challenge for any mapping system, but in our area, the maps in NTG4.5 (and TomTom) produced much more sensible route guidance than NTG5.5 (with latest maps) Incidentally, Google maps selects the best way without any provocation.
7. There is no capability to add custom POIs in NTG5.5, so lists of favourite coffee chains, hotels, or safety camera locations can’t be added.
8. Traffic information is not complete on the screen. Travelling up the M5 towards Bristol, you can see the M4 going towards Reading, but the traffic information totally stops at Swindon. Change the map scale by one click to include the M25, and suddenly there is traffic information past Swindon after all. (2D north display mode). Looks a bit like the very widescreen display is not being fully updated with the traffic content above what a ‘normal’ width screen would show.
9. The voice synthesis is quite poor compared to NTG4.5. There are quite distinct gaps in the sentences, so you get things like “Turn right towards……Bristol”. As others have noticed, this version is not so polite, with many less ‘Pleases’!
10. Personalisation is new (I think) to 5.5, and I had high hopes for it. In theory, it allows you to store all your preferences in setup, so you could have ‘his and hers’, or maybe ‘town and county’ settings. Unfortunately, once again MB have failed to fully deliver this. You can create personalisations which swop between the dash layout (i.e. Speed and RPM separate, or combined – Classic/Progressive), but you can’t also save the other components of the display, such as having Navigation on the left, and consumption on the right. I don’t really understand why the dash layout is a Comand function and not in the dashboard menu anyway.
11. Moving the map display is no longer intuitive. On 4.5 if the full-screen map was displayed, moving the control wheel moved the map. On 5.5, up/down does nothing, left/right activates the menu, so to get a map pan, you need to click down, move right, click again, and then you can move the map. I’m sure there are more intuitive ways to implement this.
12. Limited ability to generate favourites. In theory, the favourites should remove some of the issues around the complexity of the Comand menus. Unfortunately, most things I try to make favourites (by holding down the favourites key for 5 seconds) report they can’t be added. I’ve tried internal lighting and personalisation as particular examples. Maybe I’m just doing it wrong.
It would be really nice to be able to send this sort of feedback to MB, but I can’t see how, and not sure they would take much notice anyway. I’m sure they have their designers and focus groups they believe in.
Just to provide some balance, it’s not all bad with Comand. The map display on the large display looks nice (but I think without as much road detail as 4.5) and being able to put it on the main instrument area is nice. Being able to select recent destinations from the main instrument area is convenient. POI searching is much improved with the web based search, although it can be painfully slow. I just wish MB had improved on NTG4.5 functionality, rather than seemingly starting again, and losing much of the existing functionality along the way.
Before that, just to note that I’m really happy with the car, the ride and noise levels are greatly improved on my C250, the Driving Assistance and remote access/tracking/geofencing add to a truly enjoyable experience.
Comand Issues
1. It‘s slow! The displays look really nice on the widescreen display, but there is a significant lag between any entry, and something happening on the display. In most cases, it is an annoyance, but with map zooming, I find it makes the touchpad totally useless. Doing a ‘pinch’ to make it zoom is not the simplest thing, then you have to wait for a second or so to see if anything happened. If you want to zoom two or three times, the whole process takes forever, and is very distracting. Fortunately, the rotary knob is there, so you can turn the knob two or three clicks to do a big zoom in or out easily. I pity those who (I believe) will lose the wheel in the W205 upgrade out soon.
2. Address entry is also really slow, it looks like it goes online for almost everything. Originally, I thought it didn’t do full postcode entry, as it took so long to come up on the screen. I guess it depends on how good the data connection to the servers is.
3. No destination address book! I really can’t believe this is missing. You can only get to places by either entering them from scratch, or from the recent destinations list. However, unless you set the destination from a POI, it appears in the recent list just by the address, you can’t name any entry (can’t create a ‘Joe’s house’ entry). You can stick a few named destinations in the Favourites tray, but there are only 20 favourites for everything, destinations and other functions).
4. I’ve failed to find any way of seeing traffic on route, as you could with NTG4.5. (NTG 4.5 provided a simple ‘traffic on route’ text display) The little display showing overall time in traffic in minutes is really nice, but I can’t see how to easily find out where the delays on my route are. You can obviously look on the screen for the yellow or red traffic bars (incidentally I find the yellow very difficult to see against the green, much preferred the more obvious little red and yellow cars!). You can go into map pan mode, then click to see traffic in the vicinity, but this just hops around the items shown on the current display. The detail on each of these is also poor, just a word or two.
5. Waypoints seem to have totally gone. You can now set an intermediate destination, but then the arrival time is only for the intermediate destination, not the final location. I liked to use waypoints as the way of forcing a specific route. As far as I can see, setting an intermediate destination is like setting it as the final location, then setting the real final destination afterwards. Much nicer with 4.5, where you could set a waypoint, and see the effect on the final arrival time. There are obviously alternative routes available, but often they don’t offer the require option (I will know where to avoid for traffic in an hours’ time, but the route planning doesn’t)
6. The quality and/or interpretation of the map data is quite poor. We live in a rural area, and its preferred routes include roads which I would only drive down as a last resort. I’ve now stopped it going down them with avoid areas, but it still refuses to choose sensible routes. In one particular case, it will prefer going an extra 4 miles, rather than going 800 yards down a road which is much more passable than some of its preferred roads.
I accept that country roads are a challenge for any mapping system, but in our area, the maps in NTG4.5 (and TomTom) produced much more sensible route guidance than NTG5.5 (with latest maps) Incidentally, Google maps selects the best way without any provocation.
7. There is no capability to add custom POIs in NTG5.5, so lists of favourite coffee chains, hotels, or safety camera locations can’t be added.
8. Traffic information is not complete on the screen. Travelling up the M5 towards Bristol, you can see the M4 going towards Reading, but the traffic information totally stops at Swindon. Change the map scale by one click to include the M25, and suddenly there is traffic information past Swindon after all. (2D north display mode). Looks a bit like the very widescreen display is not being fully updated with the traffic content above what a ‘normal’ width screen would show.
9. The voice synthesis is quite poor compared to NTG4.5. There are quite distinct gaps in the sentences, so you get things like “Turn right towards……Bristol”. As others have noticed, this version is not so polite, with many less ‘Pleases’!
10. Personalisation is new (I think) to 5.5, and I had high hopes for it. In theory, it allows you to store all your preferences in setup, so you could have ‘his and hers’, or maybe ‘town and county’ settings. Unfortunately, once again MB have failed to fully deliver this. You can create personalisations which swop between the dash layout (i.e. Speed and RPM separate, or combined – Classic/Progressive), but you can’t also save the other components of the display, such as having Navigation on the left, and consumption on the right. I don’t really understand why the dash layout is a Comand function and not in the dashboard menu anyway.
11. Moving the map display is no longer intuitive. On 4.5 if the full-screen map was displayed, moving the control wheel moved the map. On 5.5, up/down does nothing, left/right activates the menu, so to get a map pan, you need to click down, move right, click again, and then you can move the map. I’m sure there are more intuitive ways to implement this.
12. Limited ability to generate favourites. In theory, the favourites should remove some of the issues around the complexity of the Comand menus. Unfortunately, most things I try to make favourites (by holding down the favourites key for 5 seconds) report they can’t be added. I’ve tried internal lighting and personalisation as particular examples. Maybe I’m just doing it wrong.
It would be really nice to be able to send this sort of feedback to MB, but I can’t see how, and not sure they would take much notice anyway. I’m sure they have their designers and focus groups they believe in.
Just to provide some balance, it’s not all bad with Comand. The map display on the large display looks nice (but I think without as much road detail as 4.5) and being able to put it on the main instrument area is nice. Being able to select recent destinations from the main instrument area is convenient. POI searching is much improved with the web based search, although it can be painfully slow. I just wish MB had improved on NTG4.5 functionality, rather than seemingly starting again, and losing much of the existing functionality along the way.
