My car is now almost 8 years old. When I try to search for an address thru voice commands, my Navigation system will show random places (nothing related to what I ask it) like in other states or far away places.
I also tried to manually type in the address or POI and sometimes it is able to get directions and at other times not. Is anyone here facing a similar issue?
Also note that I did not renew my mbrace subscription after the complimentary 4 years were up. Later when I tried to use other features in the App, I found that Mercedes had deleted my Account.
Could this have anything to do with it?. If I take it to the dealer, I am sure it will cost me an arm and leg!

 

I have an 8 year old '18 E300 built in July 2017. I do not have a Mercedes app. My navigation still works via voice command "navigate to Home". I have not tried searching for a new destination. I'll try that tomorrow. Other nav function are nominal.

 

I'm not all that familiar with the old mBrace. I'm on the new Mercedes me connect platform. However, when it comes to POIs, there are usually two sources. The offline map database in the car itself and the online POI database. I'm not a 100% sure mBrace had the latter, but when I search for a POI it searches the local data in the car itself as well as online. Usually the local results are useless. The online results are far more relevant and generally find what I'm looking for. So w/o an active subscription, the search is limited to the offline data in the car and this offline POI data is generally massively outdated and incomplete. Especially if you haven't updated your maps in a while, it won't know about newer businesses etc. Even if you have a fairly recent map database, in my experience the offline POI data is just a subset. You won't find many of the POIs that one will readily find in places such as Google Maps and via the online POI search.

TBH, even with the online search capability, I rarely search for POIs directly in the car. I search on my phone and then send the destination to the car via the Mercedes app's share function. For example I can search for a POI in Google Maps on my phone, then tap Share, select the Mercedes app as the target and it gets sent to the car where about a second later it pops up on the car's display and I can start the navigation from there. mBrace had this capability as well. I've also coded a Shortcut on my iPhone which lets me select an upcoming calendar event and directly send the location to the car to navigate there.

As far as addresses go, it's a similar story. If your maps are old, it may not find a street address if it didn't' exist at the time the map data was produced, so it will not be able to give you directions to addresses it doesn't know about. This is ultimately the crux with built-in navigation systems. The data gets old and stale over time unless you regularly update it, so as new roads, neighborhoods etc. are built, you can't find them and navigate to them or you get useless directions if the roads have changed, been renamed or else. The newer cars including mine that are on Mercedes me connect have online map update capabilities, so the maps stay up to date.

 

@superswiss I should have clarified in my initial post that the POIs I tried to search are like Malls or Theatres that have been around for the last 20-30 years. So not searching for anything new. Also, a couple of times I did see this message pop-up on the Navi screen,something like "No internet detected" which I have never seen in the past. So something is not kosher. I am wondering if mercedes is trying to force me into renewing the mbrace subscription.

 

I do not have an mbrace subscription and my nav searches work well. Do other internet functions work using your car's IP?

 

Not sure what internet functions you are referring to ? (examples?) And also what do you mean by my car's IP?
How do I find my car's IP ? Can you please elaborate?

 

The car has a browser & wi fi that uses an IP address to connect just as a computer does. Connect to your home network then look at connected devices in your home router to see the IP of the car.