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For the youngens here on HN: TomTom was once one of the leading manufacturers of GPS navigation systems for cars - purchased as an accessory that was stuck to t

• ars 4y ago
  I still have one in my car, despite the car having built-in map navigation. The car does not let you change anything with the navigation if the car is in motion, apparently they've never heard of passengers. It doesn't help that map upgrades are ferociously expensive, around a hundred dollars.
• FuriouslyAdrift 4y ago
  Apple Maps has used TomTom data for years (in addition to other sources).
• KingOfCoders 4y ago
  My father in law had a TomTom and maps were always years behind reality (and he paid for several updates as they promised the changes would be in there, but no), so updating or not does not matter.
  • kleiba 4y ago
    Good point. I've certainly run into situation where my TomTom got confused with reality, but on the other hand, just a couple of weeks ago the built-in GPS in my wife's car was totally unaware of some high-way in France and thought we were going cross-country through some fields for quite a long time :)
    • vetinari 4y ago
      I had exactly opposite experience: Columbus (VW group navigation) was asking me to get on a highway, but the highway was still under construction :).
  • hansel_der 4y ago
    not to disagree, but maps are always behind reality
    • KingOfCoders 4y ago
      Yes, but Google maps is quite good I think.
• LightG 4y ago
  Care to elaborate on 'since I don't have a smart phone'? That was probably the most interesting part of the whole comment!
  • kleiba 4y ago
    I wouldn't know what to elaborate?!
• brnt 4y ago
  > old car that doesn't have a screen (well, it does, but didn't come with a GPS built in I used to pick up and deliver lease cars from/to customers, and I'll never forget the Audi which had navigation, but no screen! There was a two line text display, which would show textual directions. It was an interesting experience!
  • mywacaday 4y ago
    I bought my 2009 Audi in 2014, it was missing some new roads and updates in my area, I approached the dealer about an update, they wanted €250 for the disc and €250 for the license key.
  • globular-toast 4y ago
    Yeah, VAG cars totally support having navigation with no screen! It seems quite funny by today's standards, but I guess the idea is it's like having your passenger navigate and read directions to you.
  • DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
    A two-line text display is still a screen. My dad's early-2000s Peugeot 407 also had a similar set-up: a red/orange monochrome dot-matrix display, with a surprisingly hot backlight, capable of displaying only the most rudiminary of roundabout diagrams and now-and-next directions. It did use TTS to pronounce street names with the wrong inflection and an overemphasis on "yAAARds" as units-of-distance for some reason. It was controlled by an easy-to-lose infrared remote-control D-pad: entering an address meant picking each letter one-by-one from an A-Z list until it could autocomplete the street name. I was always envious of kids whose parents had contemporaneous Mercedes with their full-color 3-4" LCD screens - until they'd told me of how bad UX was across the board: stuff like sub-usable frame-rates, overpriced map-data updates, etc - and this never got better over time until Tesla showed-up with 17" full-screen 60fps Google satellite imagery right there. And still the rest of the car industry doesn't "get" good UX. Le sigh. (Yes, I drive a Model X and I'll decide the next car I buy squarely on the car's software UX - because if they can't get something as simple as smooth framerates right then what else are they getting wrong in the car?)
• ShivShankaran 4y ago
  >since I don't have a smart phone holup. what do you mean? like you don't own one or don't use one?
  • kleiba 4y ago
    I've never owned one. As you can tell from the opening statement of my original comment above, I'm old. Surprisingly, I seem to be able to go through life just fine, so don't worry.
    • smallerfish 4y ago
      > I seem to be able to go through life just fine. [AMA] How do you find your way out of the house in the morning? And what do you do when you're stuck somewhere with other people who you don't know?
      • ShivShankaran 4y ago
        >And what do you do when you're stuck somewhere with other people who you don't know? Even worse, what do you do when you are passing by someone you barely know and don't want to exchange pleasantries? How do you even poop?
• beardyw 4y ago
  TomTom without GPS - what did it do?
  • kleiba 4y ago
    I think you misread - I was talking about the screen in my car which is used mostly for the in-car entertainment system (formerly known as "radio") and some other controls. But it is not connected to a GPS, so I'm using an external TomTom device for the rare cases where I need it.
• tannhaeuser 4y ago
  > a prime example for becoming irrelevant by society progressing There's still the use case of driving in remote areas with less-than-ideal or expensive connectivity (though probably those spots don't really require sophisticated nav), and also that you might not want to tell ad monopolies your location data.
  • bearmode 4y ago
    In those situations, just download offline maps to use?
    • reaperducer 4y ago
      You assume that one knows that the place where you're going is beyond the reach of cellular service before one even goes there.
      • reitanuki 4y ago
        With apps like OsmAnd and Organic Maps, I can download the map for the entire country and navigate off it. Highly recommended — both on F-Droid.
        • neutronicus 4y ago
          Can OsmAnd actually calculate routes? I like having OSM sometimes for, like, figuring out parking and trails in parks, but I've never succeeded using it to get directions on roads.
      • bearmode 4y ago
        With Google Maps I can literally download maps of the entire UK, and they are kept locally for 6 months? A year? I can't remember how long. Any time I'm driving somewhere reasonably far (or where I know there's no service), I'll download or update the maps. Never had an issue.
  • vetinari 4y ago
    You don't need the connectivity all the time; it is enough when calculating the initial route. After that, GPS signal is enough, and can be intermittent (in tunnels or deep valleys, for example). But I've seen another uses of dedicated GPS appliances: bikers. They use rugged ones, they don't break so easily as phones.
• petecooper 4y ago
  >TomTom was once one of the leading manufacturers of GPS navigation systems for cars - purchased as an accessory that was stuck to the wind screen. I'm of an era where my first TomTom was an external GPS receiver that connected to a PDA (Palm Pilot?) via Bluetooth, with all manner of cradles, wires and such. The GPS receiver needed to be re-paired each time I made a journey.
• acomjean 4y ago
  I had one. It worked pretty well but sometime took a little while to “lock onto” the gps signal. I think the cloud based gps on phones won for being free and having traffic info. My Tom Tom had the “mr T” celebrity voice yelling directions at me. A friend had John Clease. This is before gps directions told you street names, but with ai I think they could manage this again.
  • bearmode 4y ago
    You can already install celebrity voices with Waze
  • lozenge 4y ago
    If it doesn't lock on straight away, it also asks you if the clock is set correctly. I think those older GPS chips might only use the US-operated GPS system while modern ones can consider other positioning satellites as well. And they also can't download AGPS data of satellite drift from the internet, so they need to get it from the satellites themselves.
  • tepmoc 4y ago
    Asssited GPS[1] solved that exactly problem, since not network connected GPS devices need download GPS almanac and ephemerides via GPS 50bits/s connection, which can take a while. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GNSS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GNSS
• helsinkiandrew 4y ago
  Their revenue from 2009-2022 tells the story: https://companiesmarketcap.com/tomtom/revenue/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/tomtom/revenue/
  • smallerfish 4y ago
    Interesting, but if ever there was a y-axis that needed to 0, that is one of them. 550M revenue is a lot more than zero.
    • contravariant 4y ago
      Oh wow that's an unclear graph, putting the first tick-mark at 1B gives the impression that you're starting at 0, but there is in fact over 0.5B missing from the bottom of the plot. Good trick to remember I suppose.
      • dchuk 4y ago
        Any chart that isn't zeroed out is a bad chart
        • smallerfish 4y ago
          There's very rare cases where it's justified; e.g. if you want to show a drop in company profits from $60.0B to $57.0B, you might want to cut the y-axis so that you're showing more detail of the loss over time (maybe so that you can correlate to the CRO's lame new "motions" that they started in January). I do think it should always be called out visually when doing that though.
        • contravariant 4y ago
          It's kind of inevitable for log-plots. Or non-absolute quantities like temperature in Fahrenheit/Celsius. (You can use Kelvin instead, but good luck interpreting that plot)
    • lotsofpulp 4y ago
      Trends in profit (and profit margin) are a better measure than revenue for most established business’s health than revenue. https://companiesmarketcap.com/tomtom/earnings/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/tomtom/earnings/
• jclardy 4y ago
  I remember a time when my family called any GPS head unit a “TomTom” - not sure if it was that way outside of my family though. Almost like they nearly had “Kleenex” levels of brand recognition. Unfortunately for them the iPhone moment happened. iPhone GPS wasn’t nearly as good, and they even had an app on the iPhone (That sold for almost as much as a separate unit, at a time when developers could actually sell paid-up-front apps on the app store…)
  • LAC-Tech 4y ago
    Apparently TomTom is still the generic word in the Netherlands.
• izacus 4y ago
  I find your post funny, since I'm regularly using TomTom on my Android phone because it has a better UI and some nicer car navigation features than Google Maps. Based on the number of downloads and TomTom's financials, I'm not even close to being alone. I've also seen it as a default navigation provider in many car brands so I find your bubble biased post pretty funny - and kinda sad, because we see a lot of those here these days. Is it really so hard to stop for a second and think whether there might be people out there that don't share your preferences?
  • kleiba 4y ago
    Well, obviously TomTom is still in business but only because they adapted their original business model drastically. I think the original article is also along the same lines.
    • izacus 4y ago
      And that's good, choice and competition is good. I honestly don't get when people of HN got so hateful and dismissive towards market competition.
      • kleiba 4y ago
        Sorry, but I don't see how you could construe my original comment as "dismissive", let alone "hateful".
  • grosswait 4y ago
    The point of OP was history not preferences. And judging by financials a brief history may in fact be enlightening to many.
• rob74 4y ago
  I can trace the history of TomTom GPS devices: my first one was bought in 2008 at BestBuy in Seattle during a US trip (we called it "Dave" after the voice's name, grew kinda fond of it and even used it in Germany despite or maybe because of it reading German place names with a funny US "accent"). Of course it was limited by the technology available at the time: the touchscreen was low-res and reacted sluggishly, and the memory was limited, so you had to constantly swap between maps that you could store on the device and those backed up on your PC. I kept around a Windows installation just for updating this TomTom, because I wanted to avoid the hassle and was afraid of losing the maps when trying to transfer them. Then I finally bought a new TomTom in 2019, and it was much better: bigger, better screen, could fit a map for the whole world in memory, free lifetime updates, could connect to Wi-Fi to update itself, so no more fiddly PC software needed etc. But unfortunately TomTom's maps were extremely lacking in the very first country we wanted to use it in (Ecuador).
• 363849473754 4y ago
  Despite using Google maps I like having a separate GPS navigation system like this running in the background as a backup. That’s in case if something happens to my phone and it no longer works, then I have a secondary GPS device.
• gambiting 4y ago
  I have a modern car with a built-in satnav as well as Android Auto support, and yet I still use my TomTom 5000 - it's just better. Definitely better than crappy Google Maps, definitely better than volvo's built-in maps, and it's without any kind of comparison how much better it is than Apple Maps. You get in the car, it auto-selects the destination based on the patterns it learnt(so if you get in at 7am on a workday, it automatically selects "work" as your destination. Then around 4pm, it will select "Home". At 8pm it doesn't select anything because it has no record of you going anywhere around that time usually) - something super basic that no one has ever done. And it has a lifetime subscription to traffic updates with a built-in SIM card that works internationally as well. Drove with it across Europe several times and it's still the best satnav you could have.
  • philjohn 4y ago
    I definitely miss TomTomGo on the iPhone - it definitely routed me around more traffic jams than google does.
  • spockz 4y ago
    Waze had this auto learning feature as well. It is agressieve in rerouting but I feel it has hit the sweet spot between saving time and the extra hassle of getting off the highway.
  • SoftTalker 4y ago
    > if you get in at 7am on a workday, it automatically selects "work" as your destination. Then around 4pm, it will select "Home". OK, but you need GPS navigation and maps to get between "work" and "home"?
    • LAC-Tech 4y ago
      Presumably they have a dense network of roads in-between, where the optimal route can change daily.
    • devilbunny 4y ago
      Traffic awareness, I'd guess. I use Google just for that whenever I'm away from home (which is a small city, I don't have to go far, and I know all the alternate routes if one is busy). I already know how to get to 90% of the places I'm going in some cities, but they're the easy-to-remember routes, not necessarily the fastest ones.
• jamesbfb 4y ago
  > since I don't have a smart phone I’m edging closer to this way of living. Is this by choice, if so, why?
  • kleiba 4y ago
    Never felt comfortable with being tracked everywhere I go. Of course, that means that I shouldn't buy a new car either.
• olabyne 4y ago
  Yeah, it's crazy how smartphones crushed entire markets from the 2000s : car GPS, MP3 players, cheap digital cameras ...
  • FormFollowsFunc 4y ago
    TomTom started with mapping software for PDAs/smartphones. I remember using CityMaps on a PocketPC phone edition (with a separate GPS device) in the early 2000s. They only got into standalone devices in 2004 probably because they were more profitable than software alone. It's only when smartphones (with built-in GPS) went mainstream in ~2010 that standalone devices didn't make sense anymore.
• ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure that the original Apple Maps was based on TomTom (or maybe the second iteration, after they fell out with Google).
  • maxerickson 4y ago
    They still credit TomTom as a data provider. https://gspe21-ssl.ls.apple.com/html/attribution.html https://gspe21-ssl.ls.apple.com/html/attribution.html
• Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  Nowadays most people just use their smartphone, but there's definitely one market where an "old fashioned" navigation thing like this is still relevant: motorcycles. They need to be high contrast, low power usage (because most motorcycles don't have a power outlet), waterproof, offline, and resistive touch screens (because gloves). I did look into them at one point, but they had a €500 price tag which is a bit steep.
  • prmoustache 4y ago
    I don't know I just watch for the main clues before the ride and memorize the main highway roads and exit numbers, follow the signs and if at some point I have doubt I just stop by the side or take the next exit, remove one glove and check on the smartphone. I think my security would be compromized if I had to look at a screen regularly while riding my motorbike. I'd say a better option is to use a headset and follow vocal instructions.
  • poglet 4y ago
    I ended up just purchasing a phone mount that connected to the motorcycle. Set the destination before I left, seemed to work fine. But if you are willing to go to a bit more effort you can purchase USB charger that connects to the battery, and also get gloves that work with capacities screens.
  • muststopmyths 4y ago
    Most motorcycle GPSes like Garmin do have wiring harnesses to connect to the battery. You can also load OSM maps on them for cases where Garmin's are too expensive Edit: they are also weather resistant which is a huge plus over most phones
  • mnw21cam 4y ago
    You can get gloves that are touchscreen-compatible.
• dncornholio 4y ago
  It's not irrelevant. The quality of roads TomTom guides you are way more optimized then Google maps for example. The road graphics are also way much more clear. TomTom is what I use on every vacation trip. Wouldn't do that with Google Maps. Google Maps always picks strange roads and often I see me driving through a red light district or something, where TomTom would pick more conventional roads.
• thedougd 4y ago
  The portable GPS market was a blip on the timeline; popular for only about 5 years. Several technologies converged to make them possible: public GPS, sensitive GPS chips that didn't require large antennas, cheap solid state storage (this was huge), and high resolution color displays. As soon as they all existed, we could get portable GPS units for $400-800 USD. Unfortunately for these manufacturers, all these technologies also enabled smart phones with GPS which quickly destroyed the market.
• bambax 4y ago
  I have a TomTom GPS device for my motorbike that I purchased 8 years ago. The build quality is excellent, but the software is abysmal. It takes over two minutes to boot (!); changing the type of route takes maybe 5 or 6 touches; search results are not ordered by proximity, and offers at first suggestions, destinations that are thousands of miles away (on a motorcyle!); updating the maps means connecting it to a PC and downloading a huge, horrible app; etc.
• wongarsu 4y ago
  Not necessarily irrelevant, just a lot more niche. For example there's still a market for navigation systems for the trucking industry that consider factors like vehicle height in route selection.
• deleted 4y ago
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