What do you hate about your GPS device, or wish it did?

[relaxok]

Sorry to use this forum requesting help for a personal project, but I'd like to use this thread to find out from people what you hate/dislike/like/love about your GPS navigation unit (I'm thinking about ones used for driving directions, mainly, not hiking).   Specifically I'm interested in what you don't like about the voice turn-by-turn navigation, or in what ways you wish the voice navigation was better at telling you what to do.  Anecdotes from family members or friends are welcome too.  

Everyone seems to hate the existing ones for all sorts of reasons:
-- Too robotic sounding
-- Unnatural speech patterns make it hard to understand at times, due to the 'stitched' nature of the speech
-- Not enough advance warning of turns
-- Not telling you what the next direction will be after this one, especially if it's a significant distance leg
-- Poor at helping you get back on track if you make a wrong turn
-- Either no street names, which makes it incredibly bad, or badly-pronounced street names from failed text-to-speech conversion
-- Poor recognition of anything beyond basic turns (sharp turns, lane changes, road names that change while you're on them)
-- No identification of names of exits to tell you you're taking the correct one

Any comments on these or anything else would be great to know.  And if there's things you DO really love about your unit, I'd like to know those too.  And what sort of voice do you prefer to use.. Male? Female? Friendly? Businesslike? Natural? Robotic?

Would a truly advanced system that sounds naturally human and with all roads correct be something you thought was amazing and worth getting or is just getting by with the existing models good enough for you?

Thanks!

[corco]

I'd say my main quibble with GPS (aside from subjective objections (I believe GPS contributes to our country being a nation of destination-oriented travel idiots, makes us worse drivers, and continues to ruin the romance of the road trip, but I don't currently have much to back that up)) is that the data is still pretty...raw. It's getting a lot better, but there's still a lot of work to be done before it can be counted on most/all of the time. The fact that they are marketed as perfect and that most people seem to think they are perfect is really dangerous.

[J N Winkler]

Sound seems to be the market-dominant mode for communication between GPS and driver.  So are we deaf drivers supposed to just drop dead?

[english si]

Sound seems to be the market-dominant mode for communication between GPS and driver.  So are we deaf drivers supposed to just drop dead?

And are those of us who don't want a backseat driver telling us "in a hundred yards, turn left...turn left...in one mile turn right" would, while only finding the GPS irritating, rather than near-useless, still would prefer some way of easy navigation without resorting to audio commands or having to keep looking at a small screen rather than the road.

[vdeane]

Couple of weird things on my family's trip to DC with the GPS had me scratching my head.  For one, it considers the ramp from US 22 west to I-81 south to be a ramp from the ramp to I-81 north.  Not good for giving directions.  We could have easily went the wrong way on I-81.  It also wanted us to use the local lanes of I-270 for some reason.

[agentsteel53]

Sound seems to be the market-dominant mode for communication between GPS and driver.  So are we deaf drivers supposed to just drop dead?

yes.  yes you are.  it would be greatly appreciated if you could make your demise fiery and/or gruesome.

I've never turned the sound on on my GPS.  I do not like hearing disembodied voices telling me what to do.

[mightyace]

Sound seems to be the market-dominant mode for communication between GPS and driver.  So are we deaf drivers supposed to just drop dead?

I use the Google Navigation on my Droid in silent mode because I hate the voice.  (Though I mainly use it for traffic and ETA)  I can still adequately follow the route just by glancing at my phone screen.

[relaxok]

Very interesting to hear.  I had figured even if you hate the voice and the quality of the turn by turn navigation directions, people just left it on and gritted their teeth.   

I agree that the biggest problem with GPS devices is incorrect or out of date information.  Talk about frustrating (especially on a device you paid good money for).

I feel like part of the reason people hate the voice nav is because it sounds ridiculous.  I wonder if a more natural performance of it would be less annoying, or if it might actually be weirder due to uncanny valley issues.

[Brandon]

Why do we need GPS?  We're roadgeeks, damnit! 

[mightyace]

^^^

I don't need a GPS to find Podunk, KY.  But, they are useful in finding 1313 Mockingbird Lane.  Also, my Google one is integrated with traffic and its time estimate gives me a general idea when I'll get there.  Both are useful for my morning commute.

[Michael in Philly]

Sound seems to be the market-dominant mode for communication between GPS and driver.  So are we deaf drivers supposed to just drop dead?

Hmmm.  Another argument against the guy on Skyscraper City who wants to make GPS mandatory in all cars and abolish signs.

[realjd]

I have a GPS and find it useful for navigating within an unfamiliar city. It's great for last-mile type stuff like finding my hotel after I've flown into someplace new. And for long distance driving, I like knowing ETA and estimated distance to next turn/waypoint, but I don't find it useful for actual navigation. Primarily for the following reasons:
* Poor pathfinding - I understand that a small device like a GPS won't have the CPU power of the big Google or MapQuest servers to properly optimize a route (and route-finding isn't a trivial problem from a software perspective), but it still gets annoying when the device picks a route different than the one I'm taking and it recalculates every quarter mile and tries to get me to take U-turns to go back to its route.
* Poor route customization - This follows from my first point. I'd like to be able to easily input a route for it to follow so I could rely on my own routing skills or those of an online source like Google.

[mightyace]

* Poor pathfinding - I understand that a small device like a GPS won't have the CPU power of the big Google or MapQuest servers to properly optimize a route

From observation, I'm pretty sure Google Maps on Android phones gets it's routing information as well as its maps from the Google servers.

[Chris]

The best thing about a GPS is the power off button.

I have a couple of TomTom devices at work and sometimes they turn on without ever touching the thing. They just turn on for no reason at all.

[7/8]

I know this is an old topic, but it seems like an good place for me to vent some annoyances I've had with my GPS's.

1) Strange routings: One especially annoying situation was on my trip to Philadelphia in the spring. I was driving on US 1/13 through North Philly, and it kept asking me to switch between Roosevelt Blvd and E Roosevelt Blvd, which are parallel roads (analogous to the collectors-express system on Ontario's 401). Of course, due to this, it wasn't telling me where my next turn was, and I wasn't prepared for this route, since I was originally planning on crossing Philly on a different highway. Anyway, I was on E Roosevelt Blvd heading EB at Deveraux Ave and suddenly the GPS says to make a right onto Robbins St in about 300 m (see Google Maps screenshot below). Naturally, I'm in the left lane! So then I had to frantically change lanes to get right, but I only made it to the second-most right lane, and of course the locals weren't letting me in; not fun.



2) Street name issues: I spent this past weekend in Ottawa and the city is officially bilingual English-French, so every street is both in English and French (for example: Rue Metcalfe St). So, in my parent's Toyota Highlander GPS, if you enter the street name "Metcalfe", the following message pops up "There are multiple addresses with this street name" and then after a few seconds, it lets you choose between "Rue Metcalfe" and "Metcalfe St". But they're both the same street, so you can see how this gets annoying when you're driving around Ottawa!

Also, when using my TomTom in Quebec, it required you to type "Chemin de" or "Rue" before every street; again, this quickly got annoying and shows how this GPS was not geared towards driving in Quebec!

3) Lastly, in Ontario, the Toyota Highlander GPS (and Apple Maps) show downloaded Ontario highways as current King's Highways. For example, CR 43 in Eastern Ontario is listed as "Highway 43" and has the King's Highway shield, even though it hasn't been a King's Highway for two decades. This can be confusing since Ontario allows duplicates between King's Highways and CR/RR numbers. A good example is Hwy 8 and RR 8 in Kitchener; the screenshot below is from Apple Maps. King St E should show the flowerpot shield, instead of the King's Highway shield:

[ZLoth]

I'm a wannabe road geek, and even though I will look up the route on a hard map as well as online maps, I will use the GPS on my Android phone (primary) and standalone GPS (secondary). There are a few things that I wish the GPS had...

• A reminder function if the maps/firmware is more than 120-150-180 days out of date. I know that if you have a phone-based map, that is continuously updated. I'm looking at the folks who purchase a GPS right out of the box and never update it, causing those GPS horror stories.[/*]
  
• A pause button on the GPS. If I am on a 300 mile trip, I may want to pull over for a bathroom break or to grab a hot bite. I don't want the GPS to be squawking "Recalculating" as I'm in the drive-through for five minutes.[/*]
  
• Accurate map data.[/*]
  

[US 81]

I don't know how widespread a problem this is, but in Texas at least, most of the cities which have Interstates or US highways running through them have addresses as "12450 South IH 45" or "9314 East US 67"  where the cardinal direction derives from the city center. That's fine and even logical to a certain extent but can get confusing as the highway continues through all the suburbs that have grown with the city into a giant megalopolis, leading to all these highway segments that seem to flip-flop from North-South or from East-West and back without much apparent logic (since the freeway may be several miles from the town center from which these cardinal directions are being derived in any given segment). The narrative does not always clearly distinguish between directions of travel - southbound/westbound etc - as compared to these cardinal directions of a given address.

So I hear GPS users in my area complain that GPS works great except on the freeways.

[texaskdog]

My car has navigation but does not detect traffic so I use google maps instead.

[noelbotevera]

I use GPS to judge turns or to find specific places. Usually I don't bring directions so I have to judge which direction is which, and that means I sometimes go the wrong direction. Usually we just make turnarounds, but I think my worst is that in Richmond we were trying to go to a restaurant to meet a reservation and barely made it because I accidentally made a wrong turn and entered Goochland County.

[SteveG1988]

I use a Garmin Dezl 560, not the latest model (two years old at this point) and i have a few....complaints

1: It says "free traffic reports" what it means is, there is a FM station near most places that broadcasts data for it.

2: It gets confused with weight limits. Iowa to it is entirely off limits, due to a glitch. It wants me to go off the interstate highway system since it is restricted to 40 tons...which is the legal max i can do, so in iowa i have to bump it down to 39 tons to get a proper ETA. I know the route i am taking, the GPS normally provides distance and eta for me. This also applies to the Poplar Street bridge for some reason.

3: Not letting me know the limits around me. I have a Qualcomm/Omnitracs based GPS for the truck built into the electronic logging device, company provided of coruse. this one lets me know that if i turn left or right, there may be a height issue.  My Garmin one..no such warnings until after it recalculates. Doesn't even display it on the screen, maybe it is due to me having the smaller model instead of the big model.

4: Map and POI updates are free, but you aren't getting any major software overhauls. You are stuck with the original interface it came with.

5: I cannot set the max speed my truck can do on my model, which newer ones allow. My truck is governed to 65mph. I cannot tell it that is the max speed period.

[1995hoo]

Couple of weird things on my family's trip to DC with the GPS had me scratching my head.  For one, it considers the ramp from US 22 west to I-81 south to be a ramp from the ramp to I-81 north.  Not good for giving directions.  We could have easily went the wrong way on I-81.  It also wanted us to use the local lanes of I-270 for some reason.

Mine does that on I-270 as well, but even more oddly, it always wants me to move back and forth between the local and express lanes. I haven't been able to figure out its "logic" on that, so I suspect (without having measured this out to see whether it's true) that perhaps the total distance for the trip may be a smidgen shorter if I change to the local lanes, so it's basing it on that consideration. Again, I don't know, but I'm at a loss for any other explanation.



My unit is built into my Acura, so many of the comments I'd make would not be helpful to someone looking to buy an aftermarket unit because my comments are device-specific (example: mine allows me voice control over not just the navigation but also the car stereo and the climate control).

I think one irritation I find is that sometimes the points of interest may not necessarily be sorted intelligently if I look for a specific one rather than a category. For example, if I tell it "Find nearest fast food" when I'm out on the Interstate, I'll usually get a pretty reliable list, but if I instead search for a specific chain (say, Arby's), it's a crapshoot whether it'll find the nearest one or instead offer up one a thousand miles away.

A more practical annoyance is that mine will not let me use "Minimize Freeways" as a routing option if the destination is over 100 miles away. I think the programming logic here is that a non-freeway routing may add substantial time to your trip, so they don't want people accidentally selecting it (say, you had put it on "Minimize Freeways" for a local trip and you forgot to change it back before a six-hour trip). I understand that, but I also think the driver ought to have the option to override it, say by having a dialogue box pop up saying something like, "This route will add x hours to the drive. Are you sure you want this route?" After all, there are times you just don't want to use the highway, whether due to boredom or traffic or whatever, and it'd be nice not to have your navigation unit badgering you to turn constantly. (I assume even people who haven't used one are familiar with how the devices will often say "Make a U-turn if possible" when the system doesn't like the way you're heading.)

The biggest weakness of any sat-nav device versus a paper map in my opinion is that it's a lot harder to view the big picture on an electronic device, say if you hit heavy traffic and you'd like to determine where that other road goes. My built-in device is nice in that respect because it has a joystick below the screen, making it a lot easier to move the map to follow a line. My wife has a Garmin device and I find scrolling the screen with my finger to be an annoyance when we're in the car.

With all that said, I like having one of these for long trips for a couple of reasons:

–If I decide to divert off the road, the device will get me back to my route. (In July on our way south to Florida I diverted off I-95 onto some back roads in North Carolina due to a traffic jam and it was nice to have the device guiding me back to the Interstate in case a sign was missing or the like.)

–Excellent source for directions to a particular address in an unfamiliar place, or in a place like Arlington, Virginia, where there will be five different streets with the same name.

–In a similar vein, excellent way to find gas or food when you're on a road that doesn't have the blue services signs or you're in a place that doesn't put specific businesses' logos on said signs.

–Time and distance estimate in the top left corner is helpful, both for my own reference and so when my brother-in-law calls (he's always the one who calls) we can tell him when we'll get there. Mine doesn't have traffic info because that technology wasn't widely available yet, but I don't really miss it.

[roadman]

I typically use my GPS only when I need detailed directions to navigate local streets after leaving the Interstate or freeway, but will often plug it in on longer trips to keep the internal battery charged.  What I've found is that, while the first notice (both audible and visual) identifies the exit number as (for example) "EXIT 9" and gives the information about the exit, subsequent notices only say '9' (not 'EXIT 9') without repeating the exit information.  Seems to me that could potentially confuse somebody who's looking for an exit that happens to be a numbered route, especially if they're inattentive (as many GPS users seem to be).

[kkt]

It's too hard to read in the sunlight.  Also, the batteries don't last long enough and it takes too long to start up.  If I turn it off to save power, I then have to wait a couple of minutes to power up and reacquire the satellites and then I won't check it often enough to keep track of where I am.