Driving the competition . . . Part Three . . .
OK, so where was I before getting the hook?
This crisis was not helped by the fact that the car nav system tried, but could not, always keep to the same rhythm in instructing turns. It uses speed indicators to give more distant alerts on the highway -- 0.9 miles -- to say "right turn ahead" than on city streets, where you hear the same thing at 0.2 miles. (On the highway you will also hear a final alert at 0.2 miles.) However, if you have turned right and there is another right turn in the next block, the car nav unit's instruction could be confusing over which block to turn -- the one coming up at you in 50 yards or that traffic light up there ahead. In this case, you have to check the screen to see if there is any distance remaining to the turn. It works, but not perfectly.
There are some things the system cannot do, most notably recalculate on the fly, minimize trivial road switching (it also had a tendency to zig zag in residential areas near the end of a route), advise you where heavy traffic is (or may be). It also was prone to occasional, minor mapping errors -- but I believe everyone is pretty much using NavTech for mapping, so there wouldn't be a competitive advantage there. As one family member pointed out, it cannot be programmed to provide a good multipoint route (he is in the car all day going to different addresses and would love this feature). Perhaps the TRMB product may get this feature.
On the other hand, it typically works well. I and my passengers were very impressed with the whole concept. For me, the twenty first century arrived as we were using GPS to get to the Getty Museum in LA (or was it "Brentwood" -- too recent to be in the mapping database, anyway), which looks like an artist's rendering of a hilltop museum campus, where we saw one exhibit in the form of a 3-D, virtual reality tour of a computer-generated reconstructed of Trajan's Forum in Rome. My wife would definitely be a buyer; so would my travelling brother (if there were multipoint routing and a $1,000 price tag); so will I. The system worked great to go on LA highways, as well as ordinary suburban streets, especially at night.
This technology is a winner. And, I think the Orbi system (which, to be fair, is about a year or two old) can be beat.
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