mnje350

I tried to renew just the traffic portion only from Sirius satelite and they tell me that because there is only one ESN associated with the car and because it is a radio, they can not renew just the traffic. I have to get the whole service for 12.95 a month. I have a 2010 E350 with the P2 package with navigation.

I believe that some of you have renewed just the traffic. What is the trick to this? I really hate the audio. The sound quality is lousy and it is expensive.

Thanks for the help.

Arrie

You bought a $50 000+ car and think $13/month radio service is expensive! You bought a wrong car!!!!

Trade it in for a Chrysler or something similar so you can affort the Sirius radio.

UK-C200

That's four extra lattes a month, so why waste it if you don't have too?!

Seriously, though, I've not heard of any MB owner managing to convince Sirius to do the "traffic only" renewal..

sosh

You can do the radio alone but not the traffic alone. I disagree about the audio beind bad and find it excellent. Dealing with those people on a renewal is a PIA.

hanjaya1

Hello mnje350,
I just renew my Sirius traffic only. It is $3.99 per month. So I paid $47.88 total. I very rarely listen to Sirius radio since I listen the music from my Iphone and pandora.

I told the Sirius rep right from the beginning that I only want to renew the traffic portion only. I also mention the pricing from the forum. Yes, they pretended that they know nothing about this package. Keep pushing or talk to their supervisor if they still not let you purchase the traffic portion only. Good luck...

I did

hyperion667

LOL, what a nice comment........
how many people simply enjoy throwing their money away?
For the RADIO it is a rip off.....the traffic I am not impressed with either.....(same old songs over and over)
just last night the traffic mo mo was saying the highway traffic was stopped, when it wasn't........it is kind of funny to see how stupid they both are.......

that is unless you LIKE to listen to crap, hacknyed music........
but you know to each their own huh?

aeggroup

I also renewed my Sirius traffic only. The rep was trying to sell me a radio service as well, but I don't like Sirius and refused to buy it. He said - Ok...you can have only traffic. It was about 1 year ago. Perhaps they changed rules...

petee1997

I for one did not renew my subscription after the free six months. My wife let hers lapse also but subscribed again when they offered a one year subscription for $75.00. She will not renew it again because she never uses it. Both of us use our ipods and the service is redundant.

asm777

Agree with other posters... do you like to throw your money away for things you don't need? I can sell you a subscription for free oxygen for $9.99/mo... =)

To the OP and others, the Sirius Traffic site (http://www.siriusxm.com/siriustraffic) says the following:

Also, MB E-Class 2009-2011 are explicitly listed as compatible so if the Sirius rep is giving you the run-around... might want to point them to the above link?

Anyway, have only read about nightmares trying to get just Sirius traffic to work with one ESN both here and on Audi forums so we've just let our subscriptions lapse after the free trials... still debating whether I might pick up one of these days when Sirius calls and tell them that I'll only pay for Traffic if they'll enable it on two cars for the price of one. =)

mnje350

Thanks to all, except Arrie, for the helpful replies. I have learned the following. There is a separate ESN for the traffic only, Sirius will renew just that for 3.50 per month. So that works out fine.

Now for Arrie,

My issue is not the 12.50 per month for the audio. My issue is the 12.50 per month for lousy sound quality of the satellite radio. And no, I rarely pay for things I neither want to use or will use. I am still wondering what the Chrysler reference is all about unless you are referring to when MB owned Chrysler. In either case, your reply was neither helpful or necessary.

Arrie

Have your Sirius radio replaced. There is nothing wrong with the sirius sound quality, if you have a problem with it you must have problems with your receiver.

cvinfig

Are you serious??? The sound quality of both XM and Sirius is horrible, absolutely horrible. I don't understand how anyone can listen to it. Talk is fine but music, no way. It pretty much sounds like MP3 tracks at 64 kbps with compression artifacts aplenty. Definitely much worse than FM...

mnje350

Arrie,

Lousy sound quality has always been my beef with satelite radio. Ever since it first came out. So I don't expect any amount of replacing equipment will change the sound quality. All other sources through the HK system are just fine for my level of expectation, except satelite radio.

Even if it worked well, I NEVER use it. Get it? NEVER... I have 6 gigs of onboard music and I just picked up a 32 GB USB drive the I plugged in to the aux port that allows me to play all of the music I want ever want to hear. I get all of the talk radio I need everywhere else. Why in the world do I need to pay for more music. I love the traffic information though. That is of value to me.

Seriously Arrie, you must work for either XM or sirius.

220S

+1000

I don't know of one person on earth who likes the sound quality from sat radio in any car. Porsche, BMW, Audi, MB. It has nothing to do with the car's hardware. It's compressed kps streaming crap. It's okay with news and such, but forget any high fidelity music. Programming, on the other hand, is the only thing that make sat radio worthwhile (although obviously not enough for everyone to be subscribers.)

A 6 year old article, but you'll get the point: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7150262/...h_and_gadgets/

Arrie

Ok,

you sit in your car driving on a highway that generates 80+ dB wind and road noise and you comnplain about sound quality of your satellite radio?!? Unless you wear ear covering headphones while you listen to your car's sound system you should not talk about sound quality. It only counts if you sit in the car which is not moving.

220S

Sorry, but moving or not the quality of sat radio is poor. It's the compressed streaming rate that's the issue. Nobody is making this up, it's all very well understood.

While you're moving at 75 mph on the freeway, put in a DVD-A or CD and listen. Then quickly switch to sat radio. Now switch to HD FM radio. Go back and forth and let your own ears easily tell you the difference

K-A

Sound quality of Sat Radio is terrible. It sounds like your listening to cheap 128kbps MP3 rips off of Youtube. I still love it though, but when you switch back to even the Radio (which in itself usually isn't supposed to have as good of sound quality as a CD, for example, although I find this to be stereo-dependant to an extent), it sounds 100x better.

hanjaya1

The BT audio with booster feature on is the best sound quality, followed by direct IPod/iphone connection, regular cd audio, hd radio, storage media, and the last one: the satelite radio. That's why, I am listening only to my Iphone most of the time and not really care about satelite radio. The Pandora feature is awesome, free and has great if not the best sound quality through my Iphone-BT audio.

Al045

Looking at the original post. I also tried to renew both Sirius radio and traffic. Sirius thinks there's a second ESN for data/traffic What did you do?

mnje350

There actually is a second ESN. You can find the number in the following way. In nav mode select the last menu option on the left and select sirius information. It will list the ESN for the navi system. It is different from the radio. they will renew just the traffic and it only costs 3.5 per month.

Hope this helps.

Ctrl+alt+Elite

sirius keeps sending me mail and they just keep extending the free months... 1st 5 months, then 6 months.. what's next, 12 months? I had the first 30 days when i got the car... not impressed. Most of the music is the same already played out crap from the radio

pmb600

Best trick for Sirius is to let it expire and then get the promo rate when they try to get you back. I think I paid around $25 for 5 months of radio and traffic.

And for the record, I despise the audio quality of Sirius and think their service and content blows. I only renewed audio because I like to listen to the CNN channel sometimes. I tried asking them one time what bitrate their audio quality is and they dodge the question everytime.

K-A

Wow, I'd sign back up in a second for $25 for half a year.

I'll bet it streams at 96-128 kpbs.

hyperion667

desparity..........LOL........

no matter what they do.......it'll still suck...........

Stick Girl

I know this thread is semi-old, but here is my story. During the 6 month trial, both radio and traffic worked just fine. At the end of the trial, I was lucky enough to call in and get the agent to transfer my lifetime sub from my C-Class to the E for only $75 (was told before that this wasn't allowed - had to be new radio, same car). After that, traffic didn't work anymore. Called to report it twice. Both times, they sent out a signal because they couldn't figure out why it wasn't working.

Fast forward to this week. The agent tells me that the lifetime sub didn't include traffic and that there was no lifetime traffic option. I agreed to the $3.99/mo add on. He had trouble adding it because they system would accept the add on, but he assured me that all would be fine once he resent the signal. It didn't...

A few days later, the new agent finally said that traffic wouldn't work with a lifetime sub unless I had a different ID for the traffic to assign it to or to go from lifetime to an annual sub on the radio (WTF???)

I guess I won't have traffic because there is only one radio ID and I'd be stupid to change from lifetime to annual!