We recently bought a Mercedes-Benz 2015 C300 for my wife, and I am generally pleased with the performance of the vehicle. However, I am very disappointed with the navigation system which is one of the major features in the "320 Multimedia Package" that was priced at an additional $2,690. The navigation system is laughably horrible to use.
For starters, the user interface is based on voice input and a scroll wheel, so touch gestures and typing are unavailable. That in and of itself would not be hugely problematic if they could only get creative with the way drivers input information, but that is where the comedy begins. It is virtually impossible to jump straight to a point of interest search for destination input. As an example, if you just say "McDonald's" (after all, the presence of a McDonald's validates the existence of a city, doesn't it?) it will choke--instead, you are required to enter a physical address. Well what if I don't know the physical address? All the popular map applications (eg, Google Maps, Apple Maps, Waze) let me search for a point of interest without knowing the physical address. Major fail.
I later discovered that there is a point of interest search, but it too has its limitations, but this time in terms of map data comprehensiveness. I searched for my daughter's school, but the only entry it could find was a school of the exact same name but in a city that was hundreds of miles away. Given that it was a brand new car (and therefore should have a relatively recent map version installed) and given that my daughter's school has been around for a very long time, and given that all the other popular map applications that I listed above know where my daughter's school is, the Mercedes-Benz navigation fails again.
So finally, I look up the physical address of my daughter's school, painstakingly enter the information via voice command, and I try to save the address for future reference and easy access. Rather than let me save the entry with a voice-inputted name and perhaps an assigned numerical ID that I can later scroll to and select or say a number command, the navigation system asks me to speak the name of the entry. On the positive side, it asks me to repeat the phrase with the same intonation to make sure it properly stores my digital voice signature so that I can ask for it again by the same name. On the negative side, I had to repeat it several times because there were slight variations in how I spoke the name, and it did not accept those names as equivalent voice commands. I wonder how likely I am to replicate my voice signature for that destination entry to be able to successfully recall the destination on a different day? And while I haven't tested it, I suspect that if I fail to replicate my own spoken destination just a few seconds apart, I highly doubt that my wife will be able to retrieve the same stored destination using her voice command.
In conclusion, if you are considering the 320 Multimedia Package to get the navigation feature, I would recommend that you seriously reconsider. If you have a smartphone, you already have access to a wide variety of free turn-by-turn navigation applications that are far superior to the Mercedes-Benz navigation in terms of usability and map data accuracy. I do like the 8.4" color display that comes with the navigation package, but unfortunately the display does nothing to compensate for a completely useless navigation system. If I've just saved you some money, please comment below!
