Took the the GLE43 on it's first "road trip" this weekend.

One thing that I'll say that I do NOT like about MB's is the navigation input. The whole clicking and dialing thing is just a cumbersome at best to input data. We are coming off of a VW Touareg, and while that took a little bit of getting used to as well, probably the one thing that helped it more than anything was that it had a touch screen. That actually goes a LONG way's in making something intuitive.

The part about the MB that is "intuitive" is the dial, but you have to train your brain and your fingers that it's the ONLY way that you can input data. Once you get over that, and you're not tempted to try and "poke" the screen, or look at the screen, and "will" the cursor to go where you want it to, it's not terrible, but it's also not as easy as it could be either. It's definitely NOT easy for a first time user. My wife really struggles with it. It is frustrating, because I'm trying to tell her to go back, and then into the upper screen, etc, and telling someone to do that, and HOW you do that are two completely different things.

Another thing that we learned this weekend is that it is INCREDIBLY hard to move around on the screen. So, you have your route in there, but you want to see where it's going to take you in a couple hundred miles. No big deal just move the cursor around to get there. That is very very very very very painful to do if you just use the clicker side to side and up and down on the main dial. I finally figured out that the BEST way to navigate around the screen is with the TOP of the touchpad, kind of using it like a mouse. As the matter of fact, that is probably the ONLY feature that I have found so far that the touchpad is useful. The others are gimmicky at best, if not in the way most of the time.

This is our second MB. Our first was a 2006 E-Class. And, while it didn't have the input knob, inputting routes on it, was very much the same clunky process that it is now, 11 years later. It's time that MB up the game on how to get stuff input into navigation...

 

I dont even use the screen or the voice command to enter destinations. I have found it to be not very user friendly. I use the Send to Benz feature in the app and it pops up on the screen in a minute.

 

That's something that I knew existed, but I've never thought about using it. While that might be easier, it still feels like a HUGE workaround! I'm sitting in the car, and I can't get the navigation to do what I want, so I have to send it instructions from something that I can operate.

Again, I contend that MB needs to do some work on the interface there. I also contend that adding a touch screen would go a LONG ways towards making it more user friendly...

 

Voice input is very easy. I usually plan a trip and know my destination "before" I get into the car, so Send To Benz works best for me. Just copy the address from anywhere (on your smartphone) and paste it into the Send To Benz address window. As soon as you get into the car, the destination pops up on the screen. Can't get much simpler.

Personally, I hate touch screens. Having tons of nasty fingerprint smudges on the LCD looks horrible, especially when the rest of the car is pristine. But, to each his own I guess.

 

For trips, I can see the Send to Benz being beneficial. You know where you're going. However, we often use navigation on-the-fly to get to some address that we've never been to in the city. We actually don't know that we're going there until we start. In that case, input while driving would be nice.

I've had very limited success with voice input on the Benz. Our VW seemed to be able to understand voice a lot better. I should play with that more to see if there's something simple that I'm missing.

LOL. For me, the thing about touch screens is that everything that we have anymore is touch screen based. For where we are in today as a society, touch screens is how we interface with devices. One thing that was annoying about the VW was that it did NOT do pinch-to-zoom on the touch screen, and in fact when you hit it with two fingers, it would often jump around sporadically. That was frustrating as well, because that's just what we expect to happen...

 

Very true. That's the majority of the time I'm using Nav. I haven't seen a car yet that has an easy, user friendly method of inputting destinations in text form.

Voice input requires knowing the exact "commands", which of course is different for every make of vehicle. Also, it's very prone to ambient noise. Have a window cracked, someone talking in the background or even the A/C blowing, and the Nav hears and interprets incorrectly.

 

I think that this is my issue. I don't know that there's a lot of extraneous noise, but it's doing something to the voice...

 

I haven't seen a voice recognition system yet that can distinguish between voice and extraneous noise. It mixes everything together and tries to interpret it all as voice. Therein lies the problem.