Navigation System - Does it get any easier?

I live in the San Francisco Bay area. I've successfully used the navigation system for myriad destinations on all corners of the bay. I've successfully used the navigation for my wedding trip to Seattle, for destinations in Las Vegas, for destinations in Reno and South Lake Tahoe, as well as southern California all with no incident and no issues. It's performed perfectly for me in all respects. The only irritation was learning when it expects whole words versus abbreviations ("St." versus "Saint," "E" versus "East," etc.). Once I figured out how to speak to it, it's never let me down.

~ dan ~

Also the near-direction turn-by-turn maps have been very high quality with accurate everything including lane placement.

 

I just had my Prius' leather-trim interior installed in Hayward, CA (SF BayArea).
I went there in my Prius using the NAVI to guide me. The NAVI put the
destination on the wrong side of the street! When I went to pick up my Prius
the next day, I drove my '01 Odyssey (w/ NAVI also). The Odyssey's NAVI system
made no such mistake.

Overall, I found the NAVI system on Odyssey to be slower (being older, of course), but
more accurate than the one on Prius. I recently acquired a Navigon 5100 GPS. For $250, you get reall-time traffic (thru FM, no monthly fee), reality view of highway ramp, lane assist, plus Zagat review. Does NUVI 360 even come with Real-time Traffic?

 

Can't program home never mind a destination!!

I just picked up my '08 Prius, spent the last hour in the car trying to program home into the nav .
I got as far as address and it took me no further. Did not go to a map or did it say OK at the bottom of the screen
I thought ok maybe it took the address....not! 6x and I still can't figure the thing out.
I'm very literate when it comes to setting stuff up self installing cable/the computer etc, etc. This confounds me. The manual has you going from what looks to be a simple setup to another page and then another page...I need real help...Please if anyone know what I'm doing wroing would love to know myself.
Totally frustrated but love the car I now have 26 miles on it

 

It'll take some time to get the hang of it, though you'll probably never gush about it being user-friendly. If you can't get it to take your home address, you've probably got it set up for the wrong region of the country.

 

2008 Nav System

I am new to Prius with my new one arriving days ago. I agree it is far from user friendly having come off using the Acura TL system which is very easy to use and certainly faster to use. I am really surprised how complicated the Toyota system is with all their expertise in high technology...I hope I get used to over time..Not sure I will get used to using the Bluetooth phone calling by name which is definitely many to many steps to make a call.

 

It's too funny; I was so unimpressed with the nav in the Acura 2004 I drove. It was painfully slow, miserable at calculating alternate routes, laggy, over-simplified (gave me no easy control over its flexibility options, and thus no freedom) and seriously butt-ugly to use. It looked like a series of Windows 3.1 error messages all strung together in desperate attempt at cohesion.

When I installed the LockPick on my Prius it raised my satisfaction level with Prius' nav up to about 90%.

Weird how our personal tastes change how we see a product, eh?

~ dan ~

 

This could be the case. Mine continues to default to the Northwest. As lovely as Wash., Ore, Idaho may be, I live in Illinois, and even after programming "HOME" in IL, the default remains far, far away.

 

I found the map views, and there is one that does a pretty close job to my roadmate. Also, compass view is rather nifty, too bad jill doesn't quite understand that "Compass mode" doesn't mean ATM poi's!

 

Registering HOme

I figured it out only when I realized the Nav manual is really written backwards...so I started on the destination page and eureka! no problem.
that first part of the manual is all wroing and you get nowhere trying to register home.
I wonder if Toyota has an American rewrites after the japanese transalation?

 

I would imagine that with Japanese <--> English barriers faced in the video game industry would have taught all Japanese firms doing business in the USA to hire native speakers.

 

I inturpreted the original question as to how to use the Prius Nav system.

I have 97+ k miles on my 06. I use the NAV about 8 times every day. I don't think that there is much with the buttons about it that I don't know. Having stated my experience, here are some basics on it for finding your way:

1. How to Pause it so that it doesn't pester you as you choose different route through the neighborhood;
Press the "MENU" button on the right side of the MFD, then press "Suspend" on the touch-screen of the MFD. Doing this in reverse will "Resume" it's telling you which way to go.

2. Inputing a destination with the touchscreen-MFD;
Easiest way is to do it backwards.

Select the region for your destination. If I am going to somewhere in TN, the I choose Region 7.

Next, select the city. Input the city name. Go to "List" when the number of possibilities is a small and reasonable number.

Next, select the street. Input the street name.

Finally, select the house number. Put in the number.

3. If #2 does not work as expected, like you are missing the street # you need, or the street does not seem to be listed for the city, that adds some complexity which I am not covering here. Since each situation is different, ask and I will explain that situation.

4. Many very rural areas are handled a bit differently. Despite what the NAV system voice says, I generally find it exactly correct, that is it generally is exactly correct in putting the dot on the map at where the end of the driveway that I am looking for. However, the line to that dot is either not there or often very light blue. The thick blue line on the major road will end at where you need to turn off onto the rural road. If the dot is off the map, stop and search around a bit on the screen. If that does not help, running a trip "Preview" will show the way. I hope this makes sense. If you experience this, and ask questions, I can explain it better.

I hope that I understood the original post correctly and this helps.

 

One more thing about the NAV, even though it was not asked.

As I said, I use it alot. Early on, I started putting symbols on the map on places I visited. However, it was not very long till I had filled up all available memory in the Car's NAV system with these symbols. So I then started recording the Lat/Long coordinates into an address field on my PDA, and that seems to work much better. In the past couple of years, I nearly have 1000 entries for the area I cover in TN and KY.

As for the symbols in the NAV system, I deleted most of my destinations, and put in favorite cheap gas stops throughout TN and KY, and my favorite parking pay parking lots in Nashville, instead.

 

HAHAAHAHAHA that's awesome.

OK. I would admit defeat, but in my currently slightly-off-normal state I suddenly clearly see a reason for that last statement:

That's what's missing, and it makes perfect sense of the problem:

(1) it's not Toyota's fault if the GPS satellite signal isn't getting to your car (so the signal could be blocked / inaccurate)

(2) Mathematically, if you're driving on the road described, then you get to the point where your acceleration (in any dimension) is essentially zero. Thus the accelerometers will oscillate closer and closer to dead that any tiny bump (pothole, rock) will freak them out, giving a suddenly VASTLY incorrect measure of velocity (accumulating function of acceleration over time) and causing the car to display an EVEN MORE VASTLY measure of the car's current position (because this is the accumulating function of velocity over time).

If you integrate zero, it takes a while to start getting far from zero. But if you integrate a function VERY CLOSE TO ZERO, it goes freakin' nuts over different intervals.

~ dan ~

 

First, they're saying it *can* lose signal or forget its own motion on a long, straight road at constant velocity. They're not saying it *will* or that you'll ever, in your life, replicate the conditions necessary. Because it's gotta be ridiculously unlikely.

So to answer the "when will it be accurate" question (which is actually the way they probably should have approached explaining this), is "any time it has a clear signal from GPS satellites, it will be accurate to 15-20m; any time it's got the combination of both, it will be more accurate. And as long as your acceleration change a lot, if you're in a tunnel or anything else you'll be fine for all but weirdly long durations."

~ dan ~

 

Perhaps I am missing something in the manual, but how do I get the nav system to recalculate instead of insisting I go for the "legal U-Turn" if I choose to ignore taking a certain exit, etc?

There must be a setting for this (did find something in an old thread about the 06 models) but cannot find it in my 08 preferences.

 

It is my experience that the system will automatically reroute you as soon as you deviate from the route; the suggested u-turn is the first reroute in the case you site. When you pass that u-turn a new route will provided and so on.

As you noted in your first post, you do need to check your preferences. As an example, allowing or not alowing freeways can have dramatic impact on the route the system selects.