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Latest Experience w/Prius Navigation

Discussion in 'Gen 3 Prius Audio and Electronics' started by DoubleDAZ, Jun 6, 2015.

  1. DoubleDAZ

    DoubleDAZ Senior Member

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    We recently completed a 10,500+ mile trip from Phoenix AZ to Richmond Hill GA with a side-trip from Richmond Hill up to Newport News VA, Indian Head MD, Montague NJ and back through Lewisburg WV. We generally use a Garmin Nuvi 2555 to look for gas stations, restaurants and rest areas along the route as we’re driving. I use the Nuvi because it’s lets me or my wife use it while the car is moving and lets us limit results to those “along my route”. We generally look quite far ahead to see what restaurants will be available about the time we should be ready to eat. I have no problem using the Prius voice command feature. However, it doesn’t include an “along my route” option and the results don’t include a city or direction indicator, so it’s very hard to find what we need, even if we wait until we’re hungry. With the Nuvi, it’s easy to find a particular chain and see if there is one 10, 20 and/or 30 miles ahead. We can then decide if we want to go another 20-30 minutes, etc. The Prius displays distance, but the destination could be in front, behind or off in some other direction. If we stop, we can then use the Prius “along my route” option, but stopping takes too much time and shouldn’t be needed.

    At any rate, my Nuvi decided to quit working before we headed north on our side-trip. We were still able to search for POIs, but couldn’t get it to compute a route, so we lost the “along my route” option. Since the Nuvi offers distance and direction, we were able to find restaurants, etc., but we had to wait until closer to the time we were ready to eat. I would then use voice commands to have the Prius do the actual navigation. This actually ended up working quite well once I got the hang of it and adjusted my routine. I found it quite easy to enter destinations simply by speaking them, except in one case where the road noise was terrible because they were removing the top layer to lay down new asphalt in parts of Texas and the Prius can get pretty loud doing 80 mph over those stretches. upload_2015-6-6_21-56-29.png

    Having to use the Prius forced me to figure out some things I hadn’t paid much attention to, like the waypoints option. The only problem with this was that it lets you select from “stored” or “previous” and for some reason the Prius would not offer all my stored destinations, it only displayed the first 3. So, I had to select what I wanted to add it to the “previous” list and then they came up that way when I wanted to add a waypoint.

    As an example, asking the Prius to “find next McDonald’s” displays a bunch of results showing mileage, but no direction or even city. You have to manually select the Info button to see where it is and then the Back button if it’s not the one you want. This is very tedious and unsafe while driving. We ended up using the Nuvi and then using voice commands to enter the addresses of where we wanted to stop.

    Along this same line, there were times when the Prius would let me scrolled through my stored destinations top to bottom and other times when I had to select ABC, DEF, GHI, etc. Even then, I could select GHI and have to scroll up to find the first items beginning with “G”. I could select ABC and it would stop before all the “C”s were displayed. And then there were times when I had to try several times for it to displays items I knew were there.

    The other problem that bugged me was the estimated time of arrival. Unlike the Nuvi or even Google Maps, the Prius appears to use the average speed or something and the ETA was often off by as much as 30 minutes or so, depending on distance. It self-corrects as you get closer to a destination, but is still frustrating.

    As others have mentioned, instructions to turn can come a little late, especially in heavy traffic at higher speeds, like through Houston where one has to navigate a few freeway interchanges and be in the right lane to the next interchange that can come rather quickly at 65+ mph. When there’s little traffic, it wasn’t a problem because the lanes were empty. There were times when it would say turn left and then be ready to turn right, but that wasn’t always the case. I never missed a turn, but I can see how some would.

    There were also times, especially in Texas where they use frontage roads and turnarounds, where one had to be extra careful not to “turn now” or you’d end up going in the other direction rather than make a left turn. On big interchanges, a small window pops up to show the correct lane, but that doesn’t happen when it’s a frontage road and turnaround. And in some cases, the turnaround is actually the correct lane. I eventually got the hang of it, but it took awhile and I messed up twice. upload_2015-6-6_21-56-29.png Besides Texas, Ft Stewart GA was particularly troublesome for the Prius and it never was able to get me on/off base correctly. It wanted to take me through gates that were no longer used or no longer existed. Fortunately, I only used the navigation for ETA and distance, I already knew where I was going. Also, that is not completely unheard of with military installations and I don't knowho the Nuvi would have done.

    I have to admit that once I got used to not having a fully functioning Nuvi, I was surprised at how well the Prius did. My initial thought when I first bought the car was that complaints about the navigation were more because the system is different than what people were used to and I still think that’s mostly true. I think I could live with the Prius alone if Toyota would see fit to lift the restrictions while the car is moving or expand the voice command options to include “along my route”. A voice command option like “find McDonald’s in Fort Stockton TX” would also be useful.

    I’m now looking into Entune/Bing, but I shouldn’t have to “pay” for what should be a functioning system. Bing uses my data plan and Entune is only included for 3 years. I know I can use Bing through wifi to “save” destinations and not use my data plan, but finding destinations with the Bing app is not near as easy as it is with Google Maps where I can select an area and have Google show me all motels, for example. Heck, even Trip Advisor and Gas Buddy provide a map option so I can narrow things down to near my route. I can get a “list” using Bing, but not a map “overview”. I can select an item and see a map of where it is, but that can get tedious given how much pre-planning I do for our trips. The same is true of the Fuel Guide app.

    I will tell you that navigating Savannah GA coming out of a parking ramp near the Civic Center was a real trip. For some reason, the Prius GPS just couldn’t stay in sync with where we were and it had me making left/right turns when I could see on the map display that I needed to keep going straight. It was like the GPS was off by several feet making it think I was somewhere I wasn’t and it was trying to get me back on route.

    There were other minor things that bothered me at the time, but I’ve since forgotten them. The bottom line though is that the Prius guided me everywhere I wanted/needed to go with what I consider minor problems. I’m still planning to buy another Nuvi for the lifetime map updates if nothing else, but I’m waiting until I get some experience with Entune/Bing before I make a final decision.
     
    #1 DoubleDAZ, Jun 6, 2015
    Last edited: Jun 7, 2015
    NeoPrius likes this.
  2. JC91006

    JC91006 Senior Member

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    Wow that was a lot to read
     
  3. Tideland Prius

    Tideland Prius Moderator of the North
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    It appears the HDD system have a few updates that the DVD-based system (2010-2011) doesn't have. I certainly do not have the ability to scroll by alphabetical order (There are times where I wonder why Toyota doesn't include it - like search for POIs.. if I wanted Japanese, that's a LOT of scrolling to get to "J" rather than having the ability like the phonebook, to jump to a letter.
     
  4. DoubleDAZ

    DoubleDAZ Senior Member

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    The scroll is only for stored contacts and doesn't always work. I don't really care too much about that, but it's frustrating to select "GHI" and then have to scroll up to get the first few items starting with "G". It makes me wonder if it starts with the last item I selected in that category or something like that. I've also added items only to have them not be displayed in the list until I back out a couple of times. For example, when I planned this last trip, I entered our motel stop using "Motel-............". When I selected "MNO", none of the entries were there. I had to back out a couple of times and select "MNO" again before they finally showed up. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to reproduce the behavior and it doesn't happen every time I add items. Not a deal-breaker though. :)
     
  5. Tideland Prius

    Tideland Prius Moderator of the North
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    That's weird. It should start with the first letter. Basically every time you press it, it goes from G to H to I - first entry in the system if there is one that starts with that letter. It's possible it's registering your touch as two pushes so it jumps to H so you have to scroll up.
     
  6. DoubleDAZ

    DoubleDAZ Senior Member

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    I did not know that and that might explain it. Thanks for pointing that out, I'll have to be more careful and see if that's it, sure makes sense.