Silver_Lana

I have an E320 4Matic wagon loaner for a few days and have noticed that even though the Navi disk is not in the trunk, the driver display still shows the current street name I am on while driving.
Is that the normal operating behaviour for this car?
Thanks in advance for your responses!

Silver_Lana

Anybody?

brlazar2

Yes, Its Thru The Compass Reading, Cool Feature!

ahm

I have an European CLK model so I am not sure if this applies to you, but its navigator (manufactured by Becker) retains in memory a portion of the inmediate surroundings. Even when the navigator DVD is not in place (which happens a lot, because the unit has only one slot for DVD navigation and music CDs) I can still see the street names on the dashboard, at least while I remain within certain limits.

My previous experience with Becker navigation was with a TrafficPro High Speed unit, sold in the US under the Harman Kardon brand. It is a one-DIN unit that forces you to take the navigation CD-ROM out if you want to listen to CDs. Its manual indicated that once the navigation route was loaded into memory, you could take the CD-ROM out and listen to CDs. I guess Becker and other manufacturers use the same principle and load into memory "local" data to assist the driver even when the navigation CD-ROM/DVD is not present. This may also be done to improve the speed of the system (it is faster to load the information from RAM than from the disk) and to avoid having the disks spinning all the time.

Barry45RPM

Interesting that your car uses the Comand slot for the Navi DVD, and the American cars have a separate DVD player mounted in the trunk (left fender side) for use by the Navi DVD only. It leads me to believe that maybe MB has so many problems with electronics because they have so many different permutations of so many different things simply because its doable.

ahm

Please notice that I have a CLK, not an E. I thought US-bound CLKs also had a single slot for DVD and CDs...

calum

Yes, European W211 do, too.

CE750

The current US Spec Comand has a CD(DVD) slot, as well as DVD in the back of the trunk for the Nav..

As for the compass.. this is nice, it also displays the street name, and directions that the Nav is giving you. This is one area where I think MB gets 100% on execution.

DWP

It would make good sense for the nav system to use flash memory to retain data for areas near the last position of the system. The portable/aftermarket GPS units from companies like Garmin and Magellan use flash memory (or sometimes, hard drives) to store map data. DVDs aren't particularly desirable as storage media for mapping data (slow-reading, prone to damage) but they do have the advantage of being inexpensive to distribute - inexpensive for DCX, that is. Also, until we have Internet-enabled cars or memory card readers in the car, it's about the only convenient way to get map data into the nav system.

Now, if I ever went someplace that I didn't already know how to get to, I might actually need a nav system ...

CE750

that will be cool! Imagine you're at the stop light waiting for a green, and MB sends you an automatic update to your ECU... then your car stalls cause it's got a bug! :p

but seriously, that would make for a lot of cool possibilities. I wonder how long that will be? 10 years?

DWP

Honda has gone a little bit in that direction with the '05 Acura RL. They use the XM satellite service that is standard equipment in the car to send service reminders, help system updates and other textual information from the Acura Mother Ship to individual cars out there. It's a one-way feed, of course, and it's not integrated into the cell phone network for two-way service as is OnStar or Tele Aid. They also send realtime traffic information by extra-cost subscription to the navigation system, but so far as I know they don't send binary data such as software/firmware upgrades. That kind of service, and Internet connectivity, will probably have to wait for general deployment of high-speed cell networks, like EV-DO, or wide-area wireless technologies like Wi-MAX.

steph280

Yes the nav does not constantly read the DVD. It reads a region's map file and stores it in the memory for quick access. Drive a little further and you'll probably see an insert DVD error message.