Car Navigation Systems

When taking a trip by car, you used to have to print out lengthy sets of directions from an online site, or rely solely on your intuition and an atlas. Things have changed, however, and now you can get gps car navigation systems in your vehicle that will guide you just about anywhere you want to go.

Some new models of cars and trucks automatically come with this feature and others can be bought separately, such as the Magellan RoadMate 800 Portable GPS

Ease of use should be the first feature you look for when pricing auto gps navigation systems. If something is too complicated, it isn’t a good idea to have it in your vehicle. You’ll never make it to your destination if you are fiddling with your navigation system and wreck.

Look for one you can easily learn to use, and one that has a display you can easily make sense of when used. You may find that some models have too small of a display screen and that their features are complicated. You want to skip a model that is not user-friendly.

Another feature to keep in mind when looking at car navigation systems is the precision of the directions they offer. Roads change all the time, new roads are built, and construction is a huge issue. You want a system that will keep up with changes on a regular basis, and can do so with little work on your part. Updates may come regularly, or you may have to request one before you start your trip.

Some nav systems are DVD powered and updates are simply a matter of popping in a new DVD. Others come with a hard drive and requite connecting to your computer to update. Fortunately, roads don't change so often that you'll have to do this more than every now and then.

You can find car navigation systems online and at specialty stores (such as the Sharpoer IMage or Best Buy.) Shop around for the best price and ask a lot of questions before you buy. Find out if there is a monthly or yearly fee for service, and what extras a particular model may offer you. Find out if the directions are easy to access, if the model offers voice directions, or if you have to read the screen. If the screen is too bright, or if it is affected by sunlight, you aren’t going to find it easy to use in most cases.

If you don’t want to spend the money on gps car navigation systems just yet, you can get the same service through your cell phone. There are services that will send directions through your cell phone, but this will still cost you some money. This might be the way to go if you don’t travel a lot, and only need driving directions a few times a year.

Our Navigation system, in our 2005 Acura TL, is a really cool system. I’d always wondered how accurate gps auto navigation systems really are. They’ve always seemed a little extravagant to me and I wondered why bother? Especially since I can read a map quite well, thank you. But that changed when we bought the TL with the factory GPS auto nav system.

In the SF Bay Area it can be impossible to find your way around, just like any major city area. With the TL gps system you can plug in locations by address or intersection, it'll take a few seconds to figure out the route, and then it'll give you good directions to get there. The map is easily readable and the voice directions are quite clear. (Just don't take your eyes off the road to read the map!)

It did a very good job, though it got a little confused in San Francisco. SF loves to move street access points and change things, probably just to confuse people and slow traffic. The DVD powering our GPS system wasn't up on the latest changes so at one point took us the long way around.

One the otherhand, we recently moved 900 miles (to Spokane, WA) and the Acura GPS system took us right to our new front door, flawlessly.

And that’s the thing about gps auto navigation systems—as hard as they try to match a good human guide, and as accurate as GPS location is, they’re not human. They make a superb map replacement, but they're not auto-pilots. They can’t remind tell you to pay attention to where you’re going, or to check the street signs or make a quick turn, they can merely serve as a guide to the best of their programmed ability and you need to do the rest.

Good auto navigation systems are like mapquest. Ninety percent of the time they’re accurate, but they won’t always give you the best way to get somewhere or provide you with up-to-the-minute information about road detours and other changes along the route.

I imagine the technology in auto navigation systems will only continue to improve, and the next generation may be able to sense when you’re about to screw up and make a mistake and will help you try to avoid it.

One of the cool added features of the better Navigations Systems, is that they include locations for gas stations and all sorts of stores and other locations. With our system if we want to find the local Best Buy we just enter "Best Buy" into the system and it'll give us the location of the nearest one.

In a new area and want to find your favorite restaurant? Type it in and off you go. Of course, the system doesn't contain every restaurant or store in the country, but it has quite a few.

To buy a factory installed gps navigation system for your new car will run about $2,000, probably more in higher end cars. You can buy systems such as the Magellan RoadMate for a lot less, but you might not get all the bells and whistles of the factory system, depending on model, and the factory system is integrated into your dash and just looks nicer.