Factory Navigation

One month ago, I bought a new-design 2018 model vehicle. One of my first road trips was to a suburb of Indianapolis to visit my son and his family. I was surprised to find that his house address and his entire street, for that matter, was not listed in the factory GPS. His house was built in 2014, so the street was there some time before that.

It seems unreasonable to me that the maps supplied with my 2018 model vehicle are so out of date. This street is on my current Garmin maps. In addition, the well known company that supplies navigation maps to the vehicle manufacture has confirmed they had this address in their database.

Is it reasonable for me to expect that the vehicle manufacturer supply maps that are more up to date than three years ago? I can’t seem to convince the manufacturer that a no charge refresh when the next map update comes out would be the right thing to do.

Well you don’t give a brand of this vehicle which would help. Some brands come with a few free updates ( our Volvo got an update three years in a row) the next ones will be at our expense. Usually this is done by the dealer, have you talked to them?

Factory navigation units are generally not been great and that is why most of us pass on the extra expense and just use our phones. More and more cars are coming with mirroring ability that would just show your phone screen/etc on the car’s radio screen and you are good to go.
I will try and send e-mails to the manufacturer and hope for the best but would not be surprised if they don’t budge. It is not like you can return the car.

The only one I know about for sure is Mazda where on at least the 3 you can insert the SD card from the car into your computer and download updates for free the first three years, about 2 updates a year. Then paying for futher updates afterwards.

I completely agree with you. Unfortunately you’re at the mercy of whoever the car maker sources its maps from, and that’s not always something you can find out pre-purchase.

But to be three years out of date is pathetic. This was the norm 20 years ago when nerds like me were using Delorme USB GPS adapters plugged into a laptop mounted in the car, but in today’s world it’s completely unacceptable.

We got a new Toyota, The maps have been good so far but the salesman told us it would cost $700 or so to update the maps, we still have the garmins with lifetime map updates for free, car makers sure have missed the boat on this feature imhop.

Reasonable? Probably, but not likely to happen. What I like about ours is that its full screen that I can see while driving but it is a pain to use, compared to the Garmin. So often we have both the nav system going and the wife has the little Garmin going. I spent the $100 special price for the the update too and at least one of the new roads put in a year before was not on it. I think all they updated was the restaurant list so we just had to accept driving off into corn fields according to the nav system. I don’t want to unfairly diss them since I don’t know, but I think ours is by Tom Tom. I’d still spend the $2000 again for various reasons but really the little Garmin is better. Don’t bother complaining to the dealer though, these decisions are all made at the much higher corporate level.

we got the nuvi ltm, life time maps, for $170 i believe, what was $2000?

package deal for us, self rising and closing liftgate, awd , sunroof, better seats the big thing for wifey, she is loving the rav 4, and we take the dogs with us on vacation, looks fine except I will be renting a uhaul pickemup truck to put and pull the boat, but the 03 trailblazer with 188k miles, is now a town car, as I am like it has done it’s duty, and can’t imagine a breakdown with the critters and 3 suitcases, she cannot travel light, makeup case and guitar, dog food, 2 coolers, my tools etc. etc. Had 2 cats, both gone now, they loved the trip to the cabins also, and now the kid drives herself, getting easier I guess.
sorry for the ad, foggy mountain breakdown

I noticed the same thing with my car, I bought it in April of 2016. And noticed that when I went on vacation. The voice navigation prompts instructed me to to go on a newly built section of highway. However road did not not show up on the screen. If the factory nav system was to be believed I was driving across fields, through woods, and over lakes and streams. I thought it was strange the the voice prompts knew the road was there, but the GUI did not.

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Maybe your factory nav can be updated. It seems to me the dealer should do this for free, or as part of the warranty. If they refuse, it is likely that the car manufacturer won’t cover it. Contact the car manufacturer next and maybe see if the navigation supplier has suggestions.

Like I said, yearly updates are available for Acura for about $200 or $100 on sale. Not free. It essentially is a 4 hour project reloading the software while the engine runs all to get updates on the new restaurants. I won’t do it again. Just because we think something should be free doesn’t mean they are.

Just thinking, in the old days I’d have a physical map and pretty much managed to go anywhere in the country and make it back home again. Now I’ve got my physical map, my nav system talking to me, the little Garmen on the dash talking to me or the wife, and Suzie or whoever that is on the smart phone giving directions. How did I ever manage without three back seat drivers all telling me where to turn? Makes me wonder who the robots will be listening to and if they’ll risk driving into the lake.

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Wow, talk about poor software/system design. This should be written up somewhere on how not to design a system.

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Yeah, its not Acura though, its a separate software company of which I can’t remember. One thing though is you have to punch in a bunch of numbers for ID, current version, etc. And they all contained a bunch of letters and numbers including zeros. But you didn’t know if they were zeros or O’s because they didn’t have the slash. Had to call them to figure it out. I chalk it up to elimination of the draft and none of these engineers having been in the military.

Is that a 4th gen TL? The 3rd gens are DVD-based. All you do is stick the new DVD in. The system takes about 5 minutes to load in the updated software.

I just use my phone and Google maps. It works very well, it works all over. I used it in rural Scotland. And it prompted me to download the data because there were places on the route with no cell service, and automatically erased the download after 3 days. All in all, easy peasy.

I only updated on the 2012 Tl and that was a couple DVDs and it was hours for the whole thing to load up. I haven’t done anything on the 2016 RDX and don’t intend to.

I’m not sure what is reasonable anymore when it comes to cars, but if you want to deal with the issue practically there are two simple ways. The first is to simply input the street without the exact street number. Or a cross street. I test vehicles all the time that cannot identify an exact address. Most of the time it is a street re-naming, or a street that is actually part of a new development that was once a parking lot. For example, “Park Place Way.” With Park Place being a mall or similar. The second way is to use Apple Car Play and Android Auto in your 2018. Most brands now offer the app and it is by far the best navigation system in the world - when you have cell phone coverage. I wouldn’t buy a new car that didn’t offer this feature. It’s time to move past built-in navigation and the hassles and costs associated with them.

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But Acura/Honda still approved the design, so they are still responsible

Yeah, when I was an IT manager at a design company, I put in a rule for passwords issued, do not use zero, one, O, I. lower case L, S, 5.
Some people have no common sense. real problem when they are design engineers.

Problem is (at least for iphone) is that you download tons of data as you use it, which can cost lots of $$$, specially international. There are workarounds but they are cumbersome.

Dunno how much data Apple uses, but in the Android-verse it’s not all that much. Until my carrier for some reason gave me a significant data limit upgrade, I only had 2gb a month. I have to use navigation multiple times a day for work, and even with that usage I never got anywhere close to my data cap.