Dots on my map

It can be turned off. You have accidentally asked your Nav system to record the route. I'm not familiar with the details of the Gen III Nav, but one of the Nav menus will have a toggle for something like "record route", "route trace", or "trace route".

Tom

 

Yep,
It's Hansel and Gretel in your Navi, seriously. On the main MAP screen on the bottom left is a touch button just to the right of the ZOOM icon (+).

Touch that button and one of the options that will be lit up is 'ROUTE TRACE'. If you're lost it leaves bread crumb markings on the roads you've travelled.

 

Indeed, I've heard them called "breadcrumbs" for that very reason.

I wish the Nav system would recognize said crumbs and assign a higher priority to roads that have such crumbs on them. It frustrates me that my NAV system picks odd routes when, if Navlady had ANY intelligence, she'd clearly see that I prefer certain roads. I mean really, what is with that woman??? I guess she just figures men don't ask for directions or read maps?

 

ok - sorry for reactivating this zombie thread. my carpool partner had this happen and he had no idea how to clear it. Good info. It may be noteworthy that this feature is absent from Gen I and Gen II. I see why. Seems kinda like it's a lame feature. I find it hard to believe that the purpose is to put markers as you travel a road that you're lost on. Why wouldn't you just put in an address where you want to go, or any other saved marker .... or just tap a spot where you want to end up at? Who wants to travel back on a road that you shouldn't have gotten on to in the first place? If you pick a waypoint and it happens to take you back that way ... fine ... otherwise ... who'd need dots.
.

 

What are you talking about? This is one of the feature I use all the time. When I went to LA last week, I went through a maze to look for restroom. Luckily I was able to retrace the route back to the freeway from the dots on the map.

 

It's quite a useful feature, and it can save your bacon occasionally; finding your way out of a convoluted cul-de-sac, or a backwoods goat-tail, or even finding your way back to that friend's place that you visited 6 months ago but can't remember how to get there.

The Garmin M4 (long since discontinued) did it one-better. It left a trail of dotted lines everywhere you went, but when you retraced your path, it laid down another line parallel, so that if it was a route you took 10 times, you had 10 parallel lines along the route, which was a bit much I thought.

 

This only works if you plan on driving less than 100 miles in 6 months. The dotted trail is only about 100 miles long.

 

Different settings for different rigs.

 

So you're telling me that there's a setting to lengthen the dot trail? The trail is 100 miles long on my Prius and my Sienna. I doubt it's different for other Toyotas.

 

Maybe not other Toyotas, but on one Garmin I had, it stretched out for years.

 

I believe the OP refer to the OEM Toyota nav. If it stretches out for years then I can see it being a problem as the map would be cluttered with traces. Also there's the privacy issues. Anyone that has access to your GPS device can see where you've been for the last year or 2. With Toyota, the most they can see is the last 100 miles.

 

And it was.