I had my EQS just over two years and have not once received an OTA automatic map update. I complained to my dealer about this as it’s a PIA to update the maps manually. Car was in shop for routine maintenance recently and they tried updating everything under the sun, and contacted multiple people in the German factory for help and said my car should update by itself now. Just checked and a new map version is out V22/2025. And of course my car didn’t update. For people who the update works automatically, how long after it’s released do you get the update. Also some said when they drive to a new section of map it triggers the update. I’m in south Florida and don’t plan on driving out of Florida anytime soon. The roads haven’t changed much but the construction here in South Florida is relentless, and I do appreciate up to date maps especially for the POI. I did look at a new development in Port St. Lucie recently and the navigation didn’t map out the roads in the development. I ended up driving in circles till my son broke out google maps and showed us the way.

 

I checked the map information on my EQE a while back. While most of the map data had not updated, there were updates for the areas I normally drive installed. You need to scroll through the entire list of maps installed to see the updates that have been installed. Note that the update process varies by model year. In my case, automatic updates are happening.

 

I specifically checked my local area Florida and it had not updated.

 

They don't disclose how long it takes for the OTA update to be pushed to a specific car, but it takes a while. In my experience at least a month, and then it gets pushed out in a staggered fashion, so not all cars are trying to download it at the same time and overload the servers. That's a pretty standard approach for pushing out updates to a large number of devices. The automatic updates happen over time in batches. If you want the update right away, you have to manually download it. Quite honestly I don't even bother with the OTA updates. It's nice in theory, but I just do a manual update when it comes out. By the time the OTA update finally gets pushed out, I'm already up to date.

Same goes for the map being automatically updated if you drive into a new region. That's also nice in theory, but it means that you may have an outdated map as you navigate into that region until it finishes downloading and installing the update. I rather update the map in advance before I start my trip. Audi is doing it this way as well. I had an Audi rental in Europe a few years ago and drove from Frankfurt to my parent's home in Switzerland. I crossed through multiple map regions in Germany before I then crossed into Switzerland, so the on-board navigation was constantly downloading maps and by the time it was done with one region I pretty much already entered the next region. I was just using CarPlay for the entire trip, but every time it finished an update it kicked me out of CarPlay to tell me that the map had been updated. At least on the way back all the regions were already updated, so I didn't get those interruptions anymore.

 

Google Maps uses static bitmap "tiles" as I recall, not vector graphics. The area you're viewing gets updated on-the-fly. Each zoom level has it's own set of tiles. I'm pretty sure OpenStreetMaps works the same way. Don't know why it's more difficult in a Mercedes. Maybe has something to do with container security.

 

Google Maps was built as an online first mapping solution, which means if you find yourself w/o cell phone coverage, the experience is somewhere between dead in the water and limping along with a half-baked offline solution. Mercedes' system is based on HERE Maps who built an offline first platform that can download the maps for an entire country in one shot and fully use it offline with zooming and everything. Google's offline support they added later is frankly a joke. I find myself regularly in areas where I didn't suspect that I won't have cell coverage, so Google Maps can't even start route guidance, and to figure out which tiles you have to download for offline use until you have a complete set to plot a route from a cellular dead spot to the destination is at best a waste of time. The UI is terrible to download anything more than a few miles around a particular center point like your city or something like that. There's no way of telling whether you have a continues offline map on your device so that you can start the routes you need in areas w/o cell coverage. Google Maps will continue to route you on the current active route through intermittent dead zones, but it can't reroute you if you make a wrong turn, unless you planned ahead and downloaded the maps for that particular area.

HERE Maps has been around for a while. They once were the primary map provider for Windows Phone. Yeah, I know, but I had one way back in 2013 during my first European Delivery. Before my trip I downloaded the maps for all the European countries I was going to visit and navigated everywhere w/o skyrocketing roaming fees. It was great. Nowadays I do use Google Maps, because you can get cheap travel eSIMs and today's phones support dual SIMs, but as said I still regularly find myself in areas with bad reception or no reception and then Google Maps just dies most of the time. It also did poorly in all the tunnel networks one finds in the Alps. That's another benefit of the built-in navigation. It uses wheel speed sensors etc. to track the position of the vehicle accurately enough to keep navigating for quite a distance w/o GPS reception.

 

From what I have seen discussed on the web, it seems that different models and model years update different ways. In my case, updates are automatic for the areas the car is. Others I have seen need to manually update; if I go to the same site, the update options are not present. You might need to do something to get the updates installed on your vehicle.

 

The Mercedes dealer that services my car did everything they could think of to get this function to work. Did all updates, loaded latest MBUX version, etc. The senior tech worked on my car and told me he called everyone he could think of including several gurus at the factory in Germany to get advice on how to get the map updates to work. He spent over 8 hours loading software, calling other techs etc before they returned the car to me. After doing all that he told me the updates “should” work. So far the new map update hasn’t loaded to my car. On previous occasions I manually loaded the updates and had a difficult time. It took hours and one time the system corrupted and navigation screen went blank. Thankfully I was able to get navigation back. I would prefer not to do it manually since it was designed to be an automatic process, but if it comes to updating manually or not at all I will bite the bullet and do a manual update.

 

Well, I would have to say I was pleasantly surprised today. I decided to try manual download of entire North America and it went well. A new download manager was available and worked flawlessly. Maps took well over an hour to download to usb stick. I turned on car, placed usb stick in socket in top console and downloading of the maps began. Lo and behold the maps were finished downloading all of North America in about 30 minutes without any glitches. I now have all maps updated to V22/2025.

 

nice, happy to hear everything worked out.

 

Where can I download map updates manually?

 

open up Mercedes me connect on a computer. Sign in with your vin. Go to manage services and a box for manual update will take you to the online map update page.

 

OTA map updates happen usually when you've driven more than 28km and have a state of charge over 50%

it happened once when I was driving from Baker to Vegas in a odd route MBUX decided to take me, half way down update kicks off I get the updating message and nav comes back 10 mins later with no data and asked me to turn back.

German engineering!

 

At risk of stating the obvious, you need to have subscribed to the digital extra "Navigation Packet" for automatic OTA map updates.
At least that's how it is here in the Swedish market.

 

Where did you get these numbers from??

 

OTA map updates enhance the driving experience by improving route accuracy, reducing travel time, and supporting advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS).

 

how did you do manual download? can you post a link to where you downloaded from?

 

Open up Mercedes me connect on a computer. Sign in with your vin. Go to manage services and a box for manual update will take you to the online map update page.
You need a clean usb stick with no other files , otherwise you will get an error message when trying to upload the maps. You can then decide what region(s) you want to update.

 

A couple weeks ago we did a 1000 mile road trip, I manually updated my home region and the region we were traveling to and the car notified me no updates were needed. But while on the beginning of our road trip we crossed into the new region and almost immediately was notified of a map update that seemed to have completed in the background after several hours.

 

I’ve basically given up on automatic updates. Despite having the dealer try to diagnose the reason why the car won’t download the maps automatically, I’ve resigned to manually downloading the maps. The most recent time i downloaded to V22 went flawlessly.

 

The USB sticks are for the older cars I believe. My 2022 EQS has OTA updates. But there's no listing of what the previous updates were. I'd like to look at the history of the updates, does anyone know what they were?

 

The newer cars can also be updated manually via removable storage, it is better that way as OTA is a staggered release, you don't know when it is your turn. Manual update also updates certain things like speech data that OTA won't provide.

 

I have a 23 EQS and have never received an OTA map update, so that’s why I posted how to update manually. I don’t think there is a list of previous updates.

 

Peter can access the list of previous map updates, if you are a subscriber, you may ask him to look it up.

 

No need to subscribe to anyone, any dealership or even here if you ask the history of the updates, although it may be obvious as (if) it was loaded one by one.