Is anyone using the MB navigation as opposed to carplay and waze? Wondering if the MB nav gives you all the live info waze does like police locations road hazards live traffic etc.

 

MB navigation gives zero info on police, camera, or light locations and you'll be lucky to have an accident show up in time. It's only good for traffic (which you must pay for through MM). Any CarPlay navigation like waze or Apple Maps is superior. This is true for nearly all built in navigation systems and MB's isn't any different.

CarPlay navigation will sync with the MBUX nav, however it's so poorly implemented they shouldn't have even bothered. Your ETA will display in the central display corner and you get a big ugly arrow in the cluster telling you where to turn instead of an actual map. Thats it. No guidance on the MBUX navigation or overview of the route.

 

I do enjoy the satellite imagery on the M-B navigation. Road traffic info (green/yellow/red) where I live is fine. Other aspects are fine too.

 

MB's navigation system as said doesn't warn about police, however it warns of road hazards. It even warns of potholes. Newer MB models detect potholes through their suspension and then send it to the cloud via Car-to-X and then if you are near one of those potholes, you get a warning. Try that with Waze etc. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. The police reports in Waze are largely useless in my experience. By the time I get there, they have moved on to a different place. Waze when I still used it never saved me from a LEO, but my radar detector did multiple times. I uninstalled Waze after it got me badly stuck in San Francisco traffic insisting I make a series of left turns against streams of pedestrians. The in-car navigation system at the time said I should stay on the highway and I should have listened to it. YMMV as they say.

Up till now I primarily used the MB navigation system in my car and it has never let me down. In fact at times it has come up with much better detours than Google Maps for example. I've let my Mercedes me subscription expire in September, because I went away for a month. Haven't renewed yet, but I'm planning to. I use CarPlay with Google Maps when I drive a loaner or rental car as it basically transplants a familiar and personalized environment into any car. Since I have a HomeKit based smart home, CarPlay also allows me to open/close my garage door from any car, so that's nice whenever I drive a loaner.

The problem with CarPlay is that it has been unreliable in many cars, especially wireless CarPlay. Most MB loaners I've driven over the last 2-3 years regularly crashed when I was using CarPlay. Wired tends to be more stable than wireless. It was more stable in the last MB loaner I had, but really disappointed how buggy MBUX has been since its introduction. I had similar stability issues with rental cars in the past. Most of the time wired CarPlay worked mostly, but wireless was a crapshoot .But this also seems to have improved. I just came back from a month in Europe, doing a 2600 mile road trip in a VW Golf facelift rental. VW seems to have finally gotten a handle on their software. Wireless CarPlay was rock solid during the entire trip and the wireless charger worked as well. It might also be at least partly because I upgraded my iPhone XS earlier this year to an iPhone 16 Pro. Eventually, the older phones seem to have issues with newer iOS versions. Also like that I can set the charge limit to 80% now, so on those long trips I can leave the phone on the charger w/o having the battery pegged at 100% for extended periods. Overheating of the phone has been an issue in the past when using wireless CarPlay and charging at the same time.

 

wow thats a lot of info thank you we do use carplay wired in my wife’s 22 GLC 300 and wireless in our cadillac XT5 both with 0 issues.

 

I am not an Apple person, so I use Android Auto all the time. It has been flawless. I am amazed by how reliable the wireless connection has been on my 2025 GLC300. It just works. The MB NAV is not bad, but by definition the Android Auto will always be more up to date. I also like the interface a lot better, and I have access to my apps. I get the warnings on cops and potholes etc. all the time. I feel the audio prompts are much better and more precise on Android Auto. Waze is owned by Google and will most likely merge into one product with Google Maps soon. BTW, how do you get satellite imagery on the M-B navigation?

 

The car has to be in a Wifi zone to activate satellite, and there is a menu driven process to add it. I did it 5 months ago so I can't recall how, step by step. It sure makes the visuals more interesting.

Car Play was what we used in a rented Peugeot 2008 in Britain this year and it was flaky at best. Sometimes it worked, other times not. Could have been the car though.

 

My biggest issue with MB navigation (in the US) is that the maps are not up to date. They update maybe once a year. I just updated to the 2025 maps, and the street I live on STILL doesn't show up, even though it's been in place for three years, and has had houses open on it for two years.

 

It's by far an issue with the car's software. Poor implementations on the car maker's side unfortunately. As said, even MB had issues in MBUX where CarPlay would just randomly disconnect.

They are updated twice a year. If there's a road that you are missing, go ahead and add it. Depending on what kind of road it is, such as a subdivision in suburbia, it may take a while for them to get around to mapping it. The map data is maintained by HERE and like Google Maps, they have a map creator where you can add/update roads etc. that are missing.

https://mapcreator.here.com/

With MB.OS in the newest cars like the CLA, they have switched to using Google Maps, so moving forward MB's will use Google Maps natively. Problem with Google Maps and most phone navigation apps is that they are dead in the water if you don't have cell coverage. Google Maps can maintain the current route if the signal drops, but you can't get rerouted or start a new route without a connection. One of the main benefits of the MB navigation is that it always works. It won't have live traffic w/o an online connection, but you can still enter a destination in the middle of nowhere and start your journey.

 

"One of the main benefits of the MB navigation is that it always works. It won't have live traffic w/o an online connection, but you can still enter a destination in the middle of nowhere and start your journey."

That's a great point I hadn't thought of. Of course, if you know you are going to a place with sketchy cell coverage, you can download maps for that area ahead of time. Not the same of course, as having them in the car database.

 

It's actually more complicated than that. If you want to start a route in an area without coverage, you need to download all the maps between the start and the destination in order for GM to be able to calculate a route offline. That's very tedious in GM as you have to stitch together a complete map using lots of tiles. HERE Maps on the phone is actually much better at that. You can download the maps for offline use for an entire state or country w/o having to know in advance where you might not have cell coverage. It will seamlessly transition between offline and online navigation.

BTW, the latest MBUX now also updates maps as you drive automatically. If you drive into an area that you haven't been before, it automatically starts downloading the latest map data for the area. Previously only the home region updated automatically and the other regions had to be manually updated via a download from the portal. The MB navigation system, especially later versions, is much better than some people give it credit.

 

Yeah, but I don't have to do that with Google Maps. They are much better at keeping their maps up to date than HERE or, for that matter, whatever the hell Apple uses. I can't use Lyft to get a ride home because my address doesn't exist in their world... But now that I know about updating HERE maps, I will do that right away...so thanks for the link.

At least in the US, you can download maps to your phone so you don't run into that problem. It happens from time to time, as cell coverage is not always great in the countryside. I hope that MB brings that capability to their implementation of Google Map data for MBUX.

 

More likely, somebody else already reported the road to Google for you. The reality is that if you live in Podunk, USA you are way down on the priority list of any infrastructure project. I agree with you that Google Maps tends to be aware of new roads before everybody else, but that doesn't mean they are perfect. I've experienced myself on numerous occasions where GM had bad data and wanted to send me down one-way streets and such and periodically you can read about it in the news. A few months ago for example there was a case where GM sent somebody down a closed road with a collapsed bridge and the poor soul drove off the bridge to their death in the middle of the night. It doesn't always end in death, but GM sends people off into nowhere more than you know.

If you live in the middle of nowhere, you'll have to be proactive. Since you can't take a Lyft ride home, have you considered reporting your address to Lyft, so they can update their database? It comes with the territory of choosing to live somewhere with not enough customers to make it worth serving your area. Here in Urban America I don't have these problems. Everything is largely up to date and new road construction is quickly added by all the map providers.

 

Funniest anecdote about nav....

In October 2023 we had a brand new Peugeot 508 SW PHEV in France and drove it to Spain, crossing into Gibraltar. This car's built-in nav system was Tom Tom based and despite being a new car, it insisted that to cross into the town, we had to drive over the airport's runways. That had been the case until March of that year, when a tunnel had been built so combined air traffic and road traffic control was not required. The nav system was totally freaking out until we got into town.

 

Suburban Pittsburgh, not exactly Podunk USA.

Wow, that's terrible. But my experience has been different. When we lived in suburban Atlanta and a large interstate interchange was in the midst of a multiyear project, Google Maps was up to date within a couple days of changes in the construction traffic routing.

That literally happened yesterday, returning from our shiny new PIT airport. I just switched to Uber and they were able to find my house. Lyft's loss....