Garmin 3597LMTHD

My Garmin fits nicely on a bean bag holder tucked into the area by the side window.

 

Well I don't know that Garmin is any "better" than Toyota. My recent experience:
I entered an address in the Garmin (I do have the Toyota GPS too) because the night before I updated the software and the maps. The route was projected as a 4.5 hour drive when entered. My wife and I looked at the route while driving and it wasn't, what we thought was the shortest route. So, during the trip we didn't go where it directed us to go, at about the 2.5 hour mark the Garmin kept insisting we go east, even though from our current location the destination was due north. The Garmin was stuck on the original routing and did not "adapt" to my location. As we didn't know the area and were reading a book as we always do, we took the Garmins advice. 35 minutes later we realized what had happened. Our trip then took us an extra hour to reach our destination. So, Garmin isn't all that great... Buyer beware.

 

Well, I have an OLD Garmin and I think it works great.
And on Balance I have read many more positive testimonials for Garmin than negative.

So let me get this straight....

Uh, you only partially followed it's directions, and then complain that took too long?

Also on my very old Garmin, it does have settings that change what routing choices it makes. I think there is a setting asking it to choose the quickest route, or the most direct...which aren't always the same. I think the "quickest" often picks more highway options, while the most direct looks at total mileage to the destination.

No system is perfect or infallible, but for an older Garmin product I'm still impressed with how well mine works.
And I've never had to pay for a map update.

 

Completely agree. I don't want to get into a big discussion about Garmin vs Prius nav systems, but I sure am curious about the settings used on the Garmin. In 35,000 miles using both, I have only had them disagree twice. Once the Garmin took me off a freeway only to take me right back on. I chalked this up to traffic data that hadn't been updated. The other time it was the Prius that didn't offer a shortcut. I drove the route twice and the shortcut turned out to be more curvy and hilly, though it shaved 25 minutes. I think the Prius database might have been inaccurate because as soon as I took the short cut, the Prius recalculated and didn't suggest a U-turn.

I will admit that they do disagree on alternate routes more often. I have both set to offer alternate routes and use Google Maps to check some of the times they've disagreed. I found that some alternates differed by as little as 1 minute and it was almost always the Prius that offered the arguably "wrong" one. However, I have had the Garmin offer new routes as I got closer to a far destination, so I've learned to periodically re-enter my destination. One example was our last trip to Houston. I entered our Houston address when we left Ft Stockton early in the morning and it suggested a route through San Antonio using I-10 all the way. As I got closer to SA, I re-entered the address and it then suggested using SR-1604. My thought is that the time of day had changed.

There are other things. The Prius ETA is "always" off when the destination is far away, but catches up the closer I get. The Prius often says I have arrived 300-400 yards or so short of the actual destination. One time it said I was at a motel when I had to go up a hill and around a curve. It's like someone used the coordinates for the back of the motel that was on the other side of some trees. One thing I never thought to do was check the coordinates reported by both devices. The other thing that happens is that the Prius seems to be able to only find national chain restaurants using voice commands. In Cody WY, I drove near a local restaurant and the Prius said it couldn't find it (and yes, it heard me right ), so I used the Garmin. When we got there and stopped, I manually searched and it was in the POI database. I did this several more times and every time the POI was a national chain, the Prius found it, not so with the locals that could be found manually.

At any rate, sometimes I've followed the Garmin, other times I followed the Prius, but every time I got where I needed to go without fail. This last 7,000 trip I used the Prius only, mostly because I've driven the route so often I didn't really need the GPS except for ETAs. My Garmin broke during the trip, will no longer compute a route, so I need to replace it, but not because I don't trust the Prius. Future trips will be road trips again where we detour on a whim and we need to be able to search for POIs on the fly. I don't want to have to stop to use the Prius. Right now my wife can still use the Garmin to find things and then I use voice commands to enter the address for navigation. That works okay, but without the routing part, we can't look for things "along our route" and that's a real hassle.

I did check out the 3597 and it looks like a nice unit and price. But, it appears to be from the 2013 model year and I want something newer, so I'll be doing some further research. I'm also planning to upgrade our smart phones, so I may just spend more there and not replace the Garmin at all. I was looking at the iPhone 6S Plus, but I'm not too happy with Apple's map app. So, now I'm looking at the newest Moto X with it's 5.7" display. I wouldn't use it for navigation the whole way, so I'm not concerned about data usage and not much is more up to date than Google.