Recently, I let my Mercedes Me subscription lapse because it coincided with a two-week trip, and I knew I wouldn't need the services while traveling. Upon my return, I decided to renew it. The next time I drove my car, my profile was wiped clean. I still had my name and seat presets saved, but everything else was gone. You may want to back up your profile should you ever find yourself in a similar situation.

There are two types of profiles. Local profile and online profile synced to Mercedes me. So, yes if you are using an online profile and let the subscription lapse, then they obviously gonna delete your data and when you renew you'll start out with the default settings in the online profile. If you plan to let the subscription lapse, create a local profile which will copy the settings from your current profile and then switch to the local profile. This is not particularly unusual. If you let any online service lapse, they will delete your data. Some may give you 30 days or so before they delete it, but others do it right away. It's a privacy thing. There are strict privacy laws in Europe, so Mercedes must delete your data once your subscription ends.

Thanks for the clarification regarding the local and online profile settings. I didn't realize both options were available and hadn't specifically looked into it, assuming only my local profile was backed up to Mercedes Me. Your explanation about the online profile backup and lapsed subscriptions makes perfect sense.

However, I do find it a bit strange that I created my profile directly in the car before I activated Mercedes Me for the first time after purchasing it. Wouldn't that imply my initial profile was a local one? Additionally, my profile was functioning correctly just before my trip, even though my Mercedes Me subscription had already expired a few days prior. It seems the system might default to overwriting the local profile, which isn't ideal.

Ideally, it would be great to have an option to either sync the local profile to the online account or choose to overwrite the local profile with the online version.

Thanks for the heads up, I was planning on doing the same this summer when I was away for a month.

On a side note: For anyone signing up for digital subscriptions or any digital purchases. DON’T use a random Delaware address, because they DON’T have sales tax. If you use a Delaware address your state won’t receive their share of sales tax.

First off, your response was white text on white background. Did you mean to type it with secret ink .

So the profile setup is a bit weird now. They changed how this works. I deleted my profile a while back and recreated fresh. It was all on purpose. It used to be that the online profile was created separate from the local profile. But now you start with a local profile and then it gets mapped to your online profile when you set up the Personalization service. From that point on, the profile is no longer a local profile. There's an option to turn off the auto syncing, so what happened in your case is that the auto syncing option was turned on, so once your subscription reactivated, the profile got overwritten with the default settings from the online profile. The profile syncing happens every time the car is started. My car has the older NTG 5.5 COMAND system and I get a prompt if the online profile differs from the local settings, It asks me if I wanna overwrite the settings or not, so I can say No and then re-export the profile to the server. Sounds like they got rid of this prompt in MBUX. One more thing that's one step forward, two steps back in MBUX.

Apologies for the previous response displaying in white. I typically use dark mode as default on most of my devices and there seems to have been a mix-up with the font color while I was editing my response.

I agree with your assumption and reasoning regarding the local profile being overwritten by the online one. It's definitely better to be safe and just do a backup once in a while, and I appreciate that MBUX offers this functionality, as I'm unsure if other brands do.

While I was a bit annoyed that my settings were overwritten, I do tend to do a deep dive review of my car's settings every couple of years anyway. It simply caught me off guard this morning when my speedometer indicated I was going 40 in my neighborhood... in kilometers per hour!

Not sure if anyone else has noticed but Valet Mode has been removed from Mercedes Me after you renew. Apparently they’ve discontinued the service which is a shame.

Yes, that's correct. It's been discontinued due to the overlap of functionality with geofences.

Valet mode had the functionality to notify you when the ignition was turned on or off which no longer seems to be available any where else in the app.

That is correct, however I never quite found a use case for that information to be valuable. Somebody said they used it when the car was in for service to know when it was being worked on, but I get that information from the "vehicle unlocked" alert, because when they work on it, they leave it unlocked and then I get a notification. Then again, I never actually valet park my car, so perhaps it's useful if you actually valet it. I have permanent geofences around my indy and dealership, so I get notified when it is taken off premise.

I found it very valuable to know if my vehicle was potentially being stolen or not (there’s a major theft problem where I live in Toronto Canada). I can’t geofence every area I park my car in if I’m driving to different places all the time. It’s also good info to have when I let my son drive my car, it’s easier to keep tabs on him when I know he’s stopped at his location and when he’s ready to drive home or to another destination. Again, I can’t geofence every area he may visit with his friends. I read the comment about service on Reddit as well, and I’d agree it was helpful to know when my vehicle was being worked on. Not super critical info but nice to have. I’m paying the same yearly subscription cost why reduce the amount of services.