decided to look at the video if possible from a usb stick that was in my truck. absurdly it appears that the video is under 2 minutes long and after that amount of time a new video is recorded. and it just keeps cycling like that. why wouldnt it be continuous? its not going to take up any more or less space. very odd.

That's Mercedes for you.

Can you take a picture of where the dashcam is? Close-up if you can. Do you see an actual lens sticking out from the housing or is there a flat mat cover over it?

It's a lot easier to look over files that are two minutes than hours long. If a file gets corrupt you only lose that one file instead of all the recordings. All dashcams work that way.

I think the short video length is very common for dash cams. I think my portable after market one has options for like 1,3, and 5 minute video length. The reason being is, if you need to save a clip from an incident, it almost certainly is going to be less than a minute long, often times just a few seconds if it is someone running a light and hitting you or something. Way easier and much quicker to just grab and copy over a short video than to copy over, look through and edit a long video.

I just returned from extended road trip and my longest single clip was 1.5 hours. I have mine set to individual recording. I think that the alternate setting - continuous loop - is why/how you get the shorter clips. As is the case with many labels/names used in the electronic systems, they are often counterintuitive.