tonynufc

Voice control in my 2018 E-Class is poor compared to my previous C-Class as is the command and sat nav. For a luxury car maker I expected more but have been disappointed.

petee1997

Strange comment! I find my 18 MB much better than my previous 15 CLS.

tonynufc

Great, I am happy you are pleased, many aspects of my E are better than the C but the voice control isn’t. The command system on the C had a 10GB Drive for storing music the E doesn’t, I could go on😀

petee1997

Maybe your voice control is defective.

tonynufc

The voice control works but has less usable commands, I have spoken to the dealer and they say there is an update available which may fix some of the problems. I am currently waiting for Germany to provide the update.

The_Judge

I don't see why a hard drive would be a better choice for stirring music. Hard drives are a dying technology, giving way to much more reliable and compact solid state devices. My 2018 E400C has 3 or 4 USB slots and a slot for an SD memory card. I have 173 hours of music on one 32GB low profile flash drive (about the size of a dime, including the USB connector) in just one of the slots in the armrest storage compartment.

BeachBunny

I've not tried the voice commands on the 17 or 18 E-Class, but my '15 E350's voice system is poor compared to my 2004 (14 years old!) Infiniti voice system. That system was designed to control ALL of the functions, given that the car had a central screen, a COMAND-like joystick on the dash, and everything was buried in menus. While logical and reasonably well laid out, everything required multiple button presses. Want to change the radio station? [Radio] then[Up]/[Down]. Want to change the fan speed? [AC] then [Up]/[Down]. Or you could just hit [Voice] on the steering wheel and say "Radio 96.5" or "temperature 72 degrees" and it'd do it. It even supported "More bass" or "defrost". Not too shabby for a 14 year old car.

Why hard drives? Capacity, and to an extent, reliability. I have a 1TB USB drive shoved in my E-Class' armrest. No, it's not full, but IIRC I have >300GB of audio on there, perhaps more. Solid state storage doesn't do anywhere near as well with heat as traditional hard drives do. To be honest, the car's 10GB HDD partition was too small to be useful to me, and seemed dated considering the SD card slot and wide availability of cheap SD cards. I do get a chuckle at the Apple crowd who are clueless as to how to move music from iTunes to an SD card.

ua549

IIRC there is an entertainment system limit of 50,000 files. Those will fit nicely on SD cards currently available. That makes the extra storage on a 1 TB hard drive pretty much useless.

The_Judge

As I said, my 32GB jump drive has 173 HOURS of music stored on it, and it's only half full. Using that as a crude measure, a 1TB drive could store approximately 11,000 hours of music, roughly 450 24-hour days' worth. Oh, and a 1TB portable HD costs a tad more than a 32GB jump drive. As for reliability of HDs vs. other media, well, just be sure to keep backups of anything you wouldn't want to lose.

Tony Maggio

Same for me.I own an E400 Coupe, all I can get it to do is go to NAvigation, but it will not take commands for an address, or any other commands.

MikeO3

Strange because everything the manual calls-out works for me. Climate, radio, music search, lighting, etc...

Cao Black

Agreed. Voice commands in MY2018 are superior to my previous MY2014. I'm not 100% sure, but I believe the MY2018 has been updated from MY2017.
I haven't tried every example on the linked video, but any that I have tried worked as shown. I use voice all the time.
If you have a 2018 or newer and do not have this functionality you should definitely bring it up with your Service Advisor.

ua549

There was new linguatronic hardware for the MY 2018 W213.