mwillems

I love my new 2009 ML320 CDi Bluetec - better than expected in every way. I wish I were driving it now. Better in every way than my previous two MLs.

Except one: the interface of the electronic systems is as bad as ever.

No - worse!

So allow me a small gripe just for the record - perhaps I am missing things and you can all tell me what they are.

- Huh? A GPS without touch screen? Where to select "M" you have to find a menu entry, then go left or right ten times to get to that letter, then repeat ad infinitum? That is so 1965. And the screen is silly, And the options cannot be found. And is there really no way to select a different voice? And so on. This GPS is the worst I have ever seen. By far. Which is inexplicable, when for $200 you can buy a GPS in any store that is much, much better. (And yes, I do have a TomTom sitting on the window so I don't have to use the Benz's)

- The COMAND main interface: frankly, this too sucks terribly. after 5 Benz's I still can never work my way through when to press the squares, when to press up/down. and when to press +/-. Incredibly, I find the BMW and Audi systems significantly better, even though they are amongst the worst interfaces designed by man.

- You can download iPhone contacts to the phone - great. But all or nothing, so then you need to spend an hour (I just did - an HOUR!) deleting the unwanted ones. Why no quick way? After every delete (which takes, like, ten buttons) I sit there for five seconds while the interface says "DELETE COMMAND EXECUTED SUCCESSFULLY", or some such nonsense.

- When you turn off the radio, the phone stops working too. So instead you have to mute the sound.

The CD changer is like a puzzle from 1001 nights. Every time, to sdelect a CD track I need to reverse engineer the entire system.

Just so you do not think I am an old guy who does not understand computers: I am a photography teacher and an IT Chief Technology Officer and an electrical engineer. So yes, I do understand interfaces and computers and buttons and switches. And in case you think "you just need to learn" - this is my fifth recent Benz. It's just that in the Benz, they are executed in the worst way I have ever seen.

Guess that explains why 99.9% of my PC and Mac's software is made in the US and Canada, and 0.00% in Germany!

I wish I could sit down for a drink or two with the moron engineers that designed this abomination of an interface.

(And the manuals would help if they were not three quarter filled with crazy "WARNINGS". MB is not doing itself any favours by treating us all like kindergarten preschoolers. Yes, I know not to stick a fork into my 115V outlet, and not to lark on top of playing toddlers, since it may cause them to become injured. Can someone please make all the lawyers go away?)

But by all means tell me what I am missing and why this is the best interface designed yet for drivers. I am always willing to learn...

Michael

mwillems

Oh.. and one more thing. If I were M-B, I would create a dummy interface, i.e. an interface on the Internet that looks just like that in the car. So we can all practice. That way, to learn, we do not have to sit in our vehicles for six hours burning diesel (it is below freezing here, so the engine must run).

But I guess the German geniuses who designed this interface would not think of anything quite so clever. Shame.

M-B, you can have that idea, free of charge.

am_beagle

If M-B could send their software designers and engineers to learn in Acura or Lexus shops a little while, it would be better.

mwillems

Or if they bought all their designers an iPhone. Or a Mac. Or Windows XP - they probably still use Windows 3.11! ;-)

dgiturbo

Welcome to our pain... Now just wait till you spend HOURS programming the Navigation addresses(thank to the joystick) and then to have them mysteriously disappear one day!! No fix for that memory loss, just reprogram again and smile.
Otherwise enjoy the ride and the mileage gets really better as the motor works in.

mwillems

Yeah, hence the separate TomTom. Amazing that such great car-designers can be such useless compute-interface designers.

But the rest of the car is truly fantastic.

dgiturbo

Also you might want to do a search on posts for the heater blower motor freezing in light snow conditions. Not sure if they fixed that for 09. I used a black aluminum mesh screen cut to shape, and covered the blower air intake under the passenger side hood inlet. Never had an issue.
Also if one day you stop at a stop sign and feel like you've just been rear ended, but there is no one behind you, see the dealer and have them replace your transmission valve body. That was common on the 07-08s.

mwillems

Um. thanks..!

Hope those issues were in fact fixed. Snow we have plenty of.

jean7of9

[QUOTE=mwillems;3175437]
- The COMAND main interface: frankly, this too sucks terribly. after 5 Benz's I still can never work my way through when to press the squares, when to press up/down. and when to press +/-. Incredibly, I find the BMW and Audi systems significantly better, even though they are amongst the worst interfaces designed by man.
/QUOTE]

Two of my neighbors owned two 2008 E-550. I spent several hours with each trying to introduce them to the Command functions. None of them is technophyle. Each owned several MB's before. After several months they both got desperate with trying operating Command. Within three months of each other, they both replaced the E-550 (each less than 3000 miles on the odometers) with a 2008 Cadillac STS one black and one white. Both E-550 were purchased very cheap by two smart GM salesmen for their Sunday driving.
A smarter third neighbor encouraged his grand son to learn operating the Command of his 2008 S-550. Now the grand son is blackmailing gran'pa whenever he is required to re program the functions.
Hmmmm I can smell another STS on the way.

MB Fanatic

Be glad you have the 2009 interface. The old interface of COMAND was 10x worse.

mwillems

Well, of course I'll put up with it. And being an engineer, of course I don't need my sons to program it. It is just astonishing to me how bad this interface is: why didn't they hire proper IT companies? Or read an Interface Design book? Or do some focus group testing? Incompetence, or office politics?

Much as I dislike Microsoft, here I wish they had been engaged.

roadrutz

+1 to all your comments.

I wonder what it is about German engineers that they can do such an elegant, inspired job when it comes to physical stuff but are so mind-bogglingly incompetent with soft user interfaces? I used to own a software company. When I bought my 2002 BMW X5, I swore that if any of my people had designed the NAV interface that the car had, I would have fired them on the spot. Siemens was responsible for that abomination. Here we are seven years later and almost no progress seems to have been made! The newest iDrive is way, way better than the existing version, but that just means it has graduated from "virtually unusable" to "bloody awful". I have yet to sample the joys of Comand.

One of the problems is the number of people who just learn the systems, bad as they are, and then ask what all the fuss is about. Kind of like the people who happily drive around in Buicks and have no idea why we spend all the money we do on German vehicles. If you have no benchmark against which to measure, you have no idea what is possible.

There must be a strong NIH culture among German engineers, because outsourcing their computer/NAV interfaces to Apple or Microsoft or whoever would have paid instant dividends.

mwillems

Same here. Since there aren't any.

Yes re German NIH - I cannot imagine why else they would come up with something so bad. iDrive is ten times better than COMAND, and IT is bloody awful too, I agree...

MB Fanatic

This new COMAND NTG 2.5 was designed by the Japanese actually. Mitsubishi is the manufacturer

mwillems

That goes some way to explaining it. Germans instructing Japanese in a computer interface: recipe for disaster, you might say.

Japanese Kanji is very different from a roman alphabet, which explains some of this. The Japanese mindset is also very different. Ever seen a Japanese PC? Also very different.

Still not forgiveable though!

lkchris

The radio or any entertainment sound automatically mutes when you make or receive a phone call. Try it, you'll like it.

mwillems

Yup, aware of that. I mean when I am not listening to the radio, the phone will not work: I have to turn on the COMAND system, then mute sound, otherwise the Bluetooth will not work.

But tha is really avery minor gripe - that is really OK. The other interface notes are, unfortunately, not so minor.

Keeping it in perspective: none of this takes away from the great car. But it does make me shake my head. If they had gone to Apple. TomTom, Microsoft, or even the OSS community (SuSE was German, as was OpenOffice.org, originally) they would have cone up with a muhc, much better interface.

BoBcanada

I test drove one yesterday and also was surprised how much better the car is then my previous leased 06 ML350!

mwillems

Yes, it is very good. (The car is as great as the COMAND is awful, I am tempted to say!) :-)

jean7of9

I have the integrated phone cradle (instead of Bluetooth) because it charges the phone and switches it on when starting the engine and off after the engine is switched off.. When I initiate or receive a call the music is muted or resumed automatically. Yours should do the same.
Here are some additional details: After every engine start it takes five minutes to download the address book to the car’s RAM which erases the data when the engine is off. The system works fine and is reliable. It notifies me of the existence of voice mails which I can retrieve easy from Command which also shows incoming and sent calls data. However the microphones are placed just above the upper air vents (on my E320 4matic the microphones were better placed above the driver and passenger heads). The incoming air flow saturates the microphones with a white noise which distorts your voice. If your correspondent is complaining of sound distortion just re direct the upper air vents to the floor while talking.

mwillems

Um, it's "COMAND", not "Command", which I agree would be a better name. "COMAND" is not any language, and is embarrassing in its infantile incorrectness (can you tell I don't like it?).

Maybe that's because I just spent two hours deleting names. You can import iPhone names into thephone book, sure, great, but hey, why not allow me to download only those names that actually have a phone number? Out of my 600 names, I had to delete like 400 of them. And every delete takes 8 key pressed (yes, really - 8) and then a 5 second delay. Incredible!

Again, none of this takes away from the amazing vehicle. On the contrary - it emphasises how great the vehicle is. But the COMAND interface I will never find intuitiuve. Sure, I can do it, and I can even read the manual, but it is worse than reading a VCR manual...

Yes, I grant you it is reliable.

lkchris

Ah, but you'll be back.

http://benzinsider.com/2008/11/merce...ommand-system/

mwillems

Nice. But the interfce will be bad, and... via cellular? Not in Canada, unless we want tp pay an extra $4,000 a month. The only option is Rogers, but they will not allow tethering. Until our government stops protecting their Rogers/Bell friends, we have no chance.

Good idea, but we need Apple to run this - data and design - that way it will be done well.

MB Fanatic

No what we need is Microsoft to design the system. Have you seen SYNC in Ford/Lincoln vehicles? It simply beats anything else hands down.

mwillems

Either will do, for sure. Presumably, no-one could do worse than M-B.