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It never made sense to me why you'd want to have a built-in GPS these days when modular devices are available that are A. generally better-designed and B. repla

It never made sense to me why you'd want to have a built-in GPS these days when modular devices are available that are A. generally better-designed and B. replaceable. People buying used cars in the coming years will be stuck with these big-screened dinosaurs in their dash that are essentially wasted space.

masklinn 10y ago
The big screens and not-required data connections are convenient. There are also local oddities to GPS e.g. in Japan GPS are keyed on landlines and mapcodes (proprietary GPS-ish codes) not addresses. OTOH the interfaces of built-in navs &al tend to be unmitigated disasters. At the end of the day, phone integration (Android's Auto and Apple's CarPlay) are probably what you want.
beachstartup 10y ago
although i don't use it for directions, i use the digital map every time i drive. i drive a higher end car which has two maps, one in the center console and one in the instrument pod. i set the the instrument pod to show a top-down zoomed in dynamic heading version and the console map shows a bird's eye zoomed out fixed north version. very useful. also satellite radio and weather/traffic is useful. if i want directions my phone will play them audibly over bluetooth while i look at my dash map (it's the same map!) i think any car with bluetooth and a halfway decent regular map will be useful for years to come. my parents have a 10 year old car with a map that's still useful for basic nav.
jbob2000 10y ago
My car has voice-control, so I press a button on the steering wheel, speak my destination, and I'm good to go. It works really well. I can't do this easily on a smartphone while I'm driving. The "big-screen dinosaur" is incredibly helpful for showing routes and directions, much better than the dinky smartphone screen.
- lallysingh 10y ago
  This depends on your car model. Many (like mine) have horrible voice control systems.
  - JBReefer 10y ago
    Ford has a good passthrough to Android (hold down Speak button). GM has a terrible system that requires you to wait to speak for a quiet beep, and chides you if you don't. It's very odd and never fails to infuriate me.
  - 6DM 10y ago
    I found that for my Ford Edge, I basically have to shout at it before it understands me. My wife laughs at me every time.
    - gol706 10y ago
      I have the exact same car and problem. I think her laughing is making it even harder for the voice recognition but it's hard to prove.
- Jemmeh 10y ago
  Bluetooth headset + phone gives you the same functionality. They even have bluetooth buttons you can attach to your steering wheel if reaching up to your ear isn't something you want to do. Easily replaceable, cheaper, better design.
  - arbitrage 10y ago
    Now you have to keep track of chargers, and kludge things onto your car. A button on your wheel, a holder on your window or clipped somehow onto your dash. No thanks.
    - Jemmeh 10y ago
      The bluetooth buttons just connect to your car. Install it, and then never mess with it again. I assume most people take their phone around with them these days. I have a magnetic mount in my car, so as I'm sitting down I just lay it on the magnet on the dash and go.
Tomdarkness 10y ago
The reason I have it built-in is it integrates with the head-up display meaning I don't have to take my eye off the road to see directions.
- kctess5 10y ago
  This. My mom's BMW has a really useful navigation display on the HUD. It also shows your speed. These two things mean you basically never have to look down from the window. Definitely comes in handy, especially in stressful driving scenarios.
coldpie 10y ago
Yeah, it's pretty sad. I was ready to buy a brand-new Subaru a couple years ago, but they mandated the shitty touch screen in the dash on all new models. Ended up with a used Mazda3. I was very interested in the new ND Miata, but they mandate the dumb LCD screen in the middle of the dash. Nope, not doing that. Seems early 2010s are the last of the good, pre-technology cars. Hopefully the self driving ones come soon before those models are worn out.
- joezydeco 10y ago
  The GPS navigation feature on the new Mazda Connect systems is a $400 SD card that plugs into the dash. That's it. For $400 I'll stick with my phone. If only Mazda got CarPlay working on their dashboards as they've been promising for two years now.
  - coldpie 10y ago
    Or you know, just use the physical HVAC and radio controls that have worked just fine for forty years.
    - joezydeco 10y ago
      In its defense, the Mazda Connect system is pretty nice. It's solely focused on entertainment, navigation, and some secondary car management functions (maintenance intervals, explanation of trouble lights, long-term MPG charts). Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but the touchscreen/command knob is the way things are now. You can't do terrestrial radio, satellite radio, bluetooth, USB music playback, etc with a single knob and 20-character display. All of these features have worked their way into being standard now. Nobody ships an AM/FM radio. And now that backup cameras are mandatory in the USA as of the 2018 model year, you're going to need that LCD display anyway. So it's easier to throw all the HMI/IVI on that board and be done with it. The Mazda Connect is run off an NXP iMX6 SoC, which is very powerful yet affordable enough to put in Mazda's base models for no upgrade charge. It's also highly hackable. =) Oh, and HVAC is still done with physical knobs in a convenient location.
icefox 10y ago
The navigation system that came with my 2004 Infiniti performs better than almost any systems I have used. It is well integrated with the car, it starts in seconds, there are physical buttons for the most common operations, it always plans a route in a few seconds at most. The screen space is used well so I can see what I need with just a glance. The company that built it clearly thought through what they were building and built a product that is solid and scores very high on usability. Integrated navigation systems can provide more value than what a phone can. The obvious point is that the screen can be bigger, but more valuable is integrated with the car audio to turn down music when giving directions. When driving in tunnels and there is no GPS because it can talk to the car it knows the speed and can provide better estimations. And having permanent buttons right on your dash that you can hit without taking your eyes off the road is something that no phone will have. These are the type of features that a integrated navigation system should absolutely nail. The navigation in my 13 year old car might be a dinosaurs, but in the world of car software what matters more than age is usability. Now on the flip side I have used various navigation systems that are almost the exact opposite and are always a pain to use. If that is all you have ever experienced it is entirely understandable that you might think that this years system is a dinosaur. Having recently car shopped I was saddened at the state of many of the systems I tried. They probably have 10X as much computing power, but they were slower and more difficult to use. I could easily see how someone who bought one of these thinking how next years model would be better simply because it would be faster from the faster computer when it is clear that it was lazy coding and a failure to prioritize usability.
- j45 10y ago
  I have had the same experience with my car. Car manufacturers are far better at the car/dash experience than phones, however the phones have been catching up. Apps like Waze are hard to ignore. What would be ideal is a high quality integration between the two worlds, or at least the ability to use the phone's touchscreen as an extended mirroring display of one's phone if you choose as a universal standard.
  - CWuestefeld 10y ago
    You would think so... In my '13 Hyundai, the navigation UX is pretty good, but I swear that the entertainment part of it was written by a summer intern.

masklinn 10y ago

The big screens and not-required data connections are convenient. There are also local oddities to GPS e.g. in Japan GPS are keyed on landlines and mapcodes (proprietary GPS-ish codes) not addresses. OTOH the interfaces of built-in navs &al tend to be unmitigated disasters. At the end of the day, phone integration (Android's Auto and Apple's CarPlay) are probably what you want.

beachstartup 10y ago

although i don't use it for directions, i use the digital map every time i drive. i drive a higher end car which has two maps, one in the center console and one in the instrument pod. i set the the instrument pod to show a top-down zoomed in dynamic heading version and the console map shows a bird's eye zoomed out fixed north version. very useful. also satellite radio and weather/traffic is useful. if i want directions my phone will play them audibly over bluetooth while i look at my dash map (it's the same map!) i think any car with bluetooth and a halfway decent regular map will be useful for years to come. my parents have a 10 year old car with a map that's still useful for basic nav.

jbob2000 10y ago

My car has voice-control, so I press a button on the steering wheel, speak my destination, and I'm good to go. It works really well. I can't do this easily on a smartphone while I'm driving. The "big-screen dinosaur" is incredibly helpful for showing routes and directions, much better than the dinky smartphone screen.

lallysingh 10y ago
This depends on your car model. Many (like mine) have horrible voice control systems.
- JBReefer 10y ago
  Ford has a good passthrough to Android (hold down Speak button). GM has a terrible system that requires you to wait to speak for a quiet beep, and chides you if you don't. It's very odd and never fails to infuriate me.
- 6DM 10y ago
  I found that for my Ford Edge, I basically have to shout at it before it understands me. My wife laughs at me every time.
  - gol706 10y ago
    I have the exact same car and problem. I think her laughing is making it even harder for the voice recognition but it's hard to prove.
Jemmeh 10y ago
Bluetooth headset + phone gives you the same functionality. They even have bluetooth buttons you can attach to your steering wheel if reaching up to your ear isn't something you want to do. Easily replaceable, cheaper, better design.
- arbitrage 10y ago
  Now you have to keep track of chargers, and kludge things onto your car. A button on your wheel, a holder on your window or clipped somehow onto your dash. No thanks.
  - Jemmeh 10y ago
    The bluetooth buttons just connect to your car. Install it, and then never mess with it again. I assume most people take their phone around with them these days. I have a magnetic mount in my car, so as I'm sitting down I just lay it on the magnet on the dash and go.

Tomdarkness 10y ago

The reason I have it built-in is it integrates with the head-up display meaning I don't have to take my eye off the road to see directions.

kctess5 10y ago
This. My mom's BMW has a really useful navigation display on the HUD. It also shows your speed. These two things mean you basically never have to look down from the window. Definitely comes in handy, especially in stressful driving scenarios.

coldpie 10y ago

Yeah, it's pretty sad. I was ready to buy a brand-new Subaru a couple years ago, but they mandated the shitty touch screen in the dash on all new models. Ended up with a used Mazda3. I was very interested in the new ND Miata, but they mandate the dumb LCD screen in the middle of the dash. Nope, not doing that. Seems early 2010s are the last of the good, pre-technology cars. Hopefully the self driving ones come soon before those models are worn out.

joezydeco 10y ago
The GPS navigation feature on the new Mazda Connect systems is a $400 SD card that plugs into the dash. That's it. For $400 I'll stick with my phone. If only Mazda got CarPlay working on their dashboards as they've been promising for two years now.
- coldpie 10y ago
  Or you know, just use the physical HVAC and radio controls that have worked just fine for forty years.
  - joezydeco 10y ago
    In its defense, the Mazda Connect system is pretty nice. It's solely focused on entertainment, navigation, and some secondary car management functions (maintenance intervals, explanation of trouble lights, long-term MPG charts). Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but the touchscreen/command knob is the way things are now. You can't do terrestrial radio, satellite radio, bluetooth, USB music playback, etc with a single knob and 20-character display. All of these features have worked their way into being standard now. Nobody ships an AM/FM radio. And now that backup cameras are mandatory in the USA as of the 2018 model year, you're going to need that LCD display anyway. So it's easier to throw all the HMI/IVI on that board and be done with it. The Mazda Connect is run off an NXP iMX6 SoC, which is very powerful yet affordable enough to put in Mazda's base models for no upgrade charge. It's also highly hackable. =) Oh, and HVAC is still done with physical knobs in a convenient location.

icefox 10y ago

The navigation system that came with my 2004 Infiniti performs better than almost any systems I have used. It is well integrated with the car, it starts in seconds, there are physical buttons for the most common operations, it always plans a route in a few seconds at most. The screen space is used well so I can see what I need with just a glance. The company that built it clearly thought through what they were building and built a product that is solid and scores very high on usability. Integrated navigation systems can provide more value than what a phone can. The obvious point is that the screen can be bigger, but more valuable is integrated with the car audio to turn down music when giving directions. When driving in tunnels and there is no GPS because it can talk to the car it knows the speed and can provide better estimations. And having permanent buttons right on your dash that you can hit without taking your eyes off the road is something that no phone will have. These are the type of features that a integrated navigation system should absolutely nail. The navigation in my 13 year old car might be a dinosaurs, but in the world of car software what matters more than age is usability. Now on the flip side I have used various navigation systems that are almost the exact opposite and are always a pain to use. If that is all you have ever experienced it is entirely understandable that you might think that this years system is a dinosaur. Having recently car shopped I was saddened at the state of many of the systems I tried. They probably have 10X as much computing power, but they were slower and more difficult to use. I could easily see how someone who bought one of these thinking how next years model would be better simply because it would be faster from the faster computer when it is clear that it was lazy coding and a failure to prioritize usability.

j45 10y ago
I have had the same experience with my car. Car manufacturers are far better at the car/dash experience than phones, however the phones have been catching up. Apps like Waze are hard to ignore. What would be ideal is a high quality integration between the two worlds, or at least the ability to use the phone's touchscreen as an extended mirroring display of one's phone if you choose as a universal standard.
- CWuestefeld 10y ago
  You would think so... In my '13 Hyundai, the navigation UX is pretty good, but I swear that the entertainment part of it was written by a summer intern.