A little story about the Nav system

A number of years back, a coffeehouse opened up in a nearby town. The owner also had a bagel store and a caterers in the same shopping strip.

It remained open for a while, then the owner decided to close it--not because business was slow, but because his catering business was doing well and he needed the additional space. He'd hoped to be able to take over a store situated between the two businesses, but that person wouldn't vacate. At first he used part of the coffeehouse, shrinking it, but eventually shutting it entirely.

The catering business moved in, and things stayed this way for a while. Then the business whose space he'd wanted to use moved out, and he took it over, for a while using both spaces for catering. But he wanted to reopen the coffeehouse and so made plans.

Time passed, and the former coffee house was slowly readied. It then sat for over a year and a half, waiting for bureaucratic red tape (the health department, the town, etc.) to give the OK.

Eventually, years after it closed, the coffee house reopened.

The point to this story? The coffee place was listed in the "coffeehouse" category in my 08 Prius's navigation system, despite having closed a couple of years before I bought the car. And some years after I got the car, it was there again. I suppose Toyota's theory is that if they include erroneous listings, then given enough time, they might become true.

OK, one story doesn't a fact make, but in having had both an 06 and 08 with the Nav system, and owning several Garmin GPSs, Toyota's accuracy and usability is laughable in comparison. See, e.g., this document I put together some years back (I should update it with screenshots from my newer Garmins):
Toyota Nav system critique

 

Well, I had a couple of points with this story. My prime, but tangential, objection to the NAV system was contained in the link I'd included: the biggest drawback isn't the out of date POIs, but the poor UI.

But as far as accuracy, in comparison, I bought a refurb Garmin nuvi 350 just a few months after I got the Prius, and its database was much more accurate. I was just amused in this circumstance that the NAV system was *so* out of date, that it came full circle and by sheer chance got it right.

As far as updating the system it could easily have been done much more easily and less expensively. For one... why a DVD? Doesn't that add cost and complexity? A component with moving parts that's slow and not best suited to movement. Why not a flash drive? Maybe a tenth the size and much far quicker access. And how about a SD slot so the user could add/customize POIs and routes? I think that going that route (flash memory for the main maps and an SD slot) would have been no more expensive, and likely less so, than the DVD drive. And the dealer wouldn't have to stock map DVDs: hook up to the flash drive, and it's updated in a minute.

I don't think personal responsibility is the right phrase here: that applies to not turning off a cliff just because the GPSr tells you to. If a person needs to get gas but the three places in succession the NAV brought him to are all closed or were simply never there at all, he wasn't being irresponsible.

Oh, and the NAV system didn't have a listing for any of the coffeeshops in a 10 mile radius of the place it had by accident.

 

Bernie: I had an older Garmin before I bought the Prius, and bought the NAV system for the same reasons: bigger screen and theft resistance. But when I started using it and wondered "why can't you..." I got increasingly irked. Again, look at the document I posted (no ads of any kind, I promise).

wick1ert: I definitely wouldn't want a one-region-per-card setup. I suspect that the only reason Toyota (actually, Denso) did it this way is that loading data from a DVD is so excruciatingly slow, they had to break it up into chunks to make it usable (another reason to have used flash).

What about when people travel a good distance? I go between regions all the time; I *must* have them all available at the same time (switching regions is already a PITA). How could I swap cards in the middle of a route?

As far as currency of data, I used the (older) Garmin in a cross-country drive before I bought the Prius and it rarely failed me--maybe twice on a 9000 mile drive (once a gas station was shut, and another time a coffeehouse wasn't where it brought me, though there might have been a glitch in the address I'd entered). The NAV system I would use for the most general of guidance, but on long drives when I'm away for days or longer, I bring my newer Garmin along as backup. See especially item #1.

 

What puzzles me is that there are only a few map data supplies--Toyota (or Denso) doesn't do the mapping, nor does Garmin (though didn't the latter recently buy a company that does?). So why don't they have similar data? Or is Toyota's mapping algorithm so bad it puts the POIs in the wrong spot?