I am afraid to trust my P85Ds navigation system, based on some things I saw it attempt to do on Wednesday night.
I was picking up my car in Rochester, NY after having it OptiCoat Pro'd there, and was driving it back to Ithaca. I had entered my home address, mainly to have the navigation system help me get back to the NYS Thruway from the detailer's, as I basically knew how I wanted to go beyond that. But I left the navigation system on anyway, and it was messing up in a major way.
For starters, it was going to keep me on the Thruway for about thirty or thirty-five miles more than I needed to stay on the Thruway for. I didn't look at the rest of the directions, but I believe the only thing possible from there was that the system was going to take me home through Syracuse, NY. Take a look at a map, look at Rochester, Ithaca, and Syracuse, and see just how ridiculous that is!
I did, in fact, Exit the NYS Thruway where I wanted to, to be able to Take Route 89 south along Cayuga Lake, towards Ithaca. At this point the Nav system was fighting me for quite a while, and trying to insist that I travel around the other side of the lake. (I'm not sure how big a mistake that would have been, but it would have been a much smaller mistake than the previous one.)
Eventually it accepted Route 89 as an acceptable route. But here is where things get really crazy. Periodically it kept trying to get me to turn off of Route 89, which leads directly into Ithaca, and onto side roads that would be headed in different directions. This could not have had anything to do with traffic as it was between 7:00 and 8:00 PM, and there were basically almost no other cars on the road, and there just isn't ever traffic on these roads, and even if there was, there wouldn't be any reporting of it. We're not talking about the 405 in LA.
My concern is that if I wanted to rely on the car's navigation system in an area where I really did not know my way around, I don't think I could. I guess if I know I am close to a highway or something, and just want to rely on the car's system to help get me to the highway, that may be fine, but for anything important and with any distance involved I think I'm going to have to rely on Mapquest or Google Maps or something like that.
I had read in these forums that the Navigation system was not up to par with respect to lack of features. I knew you couldn't select from a choice of routes, or decide between optimizing for speed or lack of tolls, etc. And I also had read that the big screen sometimes flaked out, redrew things, would have people drive in circles, etc. , but that the dashboard navigation was OK. I don't think I had read that the system was actually unreliable with respect to crazy routing. I really hope this is something that gets corrected in a future software release. It would be nice to be able to rely on the car's built in navigation system.
I was picking up my car in Rochester, NY after having it OptiCoat Pro'd there, and was driving it back to Ithaca. I had entered my home address, mainly to have the navigation system help me get back to the NYS Thruway from the detailer's, as I basically knew how I wanted to go beyond that. But I left the navigation system on anyway, and it was messing up in a major way.
For starters, it was going to keep me on the Thruway for about thirty or thirty-five miles more than I needed to stay on the Thruway for. I didn't look at the rest of the directions, but I believe the only thing possible from there was that the system was going to take me home through Syracuse, NY. Take a look at a map, look at Rochester, Ithaca, and Syracuse, and see just how ridiculous that is!
I did, in fact, Exit the NYS Thruway where I wanted to, to be able to Take Route 89 south along Cayuga Lake, towards Ithaca. At this point the Nav system was fighting me for quite a while, and trying to insist that I travel around the other side of the lake. (I'm not sure how big a mistake that would have been, but it would have been a much smaller mistake than the previous one.)
Eventually it accepted Route 89 as an acceptable route. But here is where things get really crazy. Periodically it kept trying to get me to turn off of Route 89, which leads directly into Ithaca, and onto side roads that would be headed in different directions. This could not have had anything to do with traffic as it was between 7:00 and 8:00 PM, and there were basically almost no other cars on the road, and there just isn't ever traffic on these roads, and even if there was, there wouldn't be any reporting of it. We're not talking about the 405 in LA.
My concern is that if I wanted to rely on the car's navigation system in an area where I really did not know my way around, I don't think I could. I guess if I know I am close to a highway or something, and just want to rely on the car's system to help get me to the highway, that may be fine, but for anything important and with any distance involved I think I'm going to have to rely on Mapquest or Google Maps or something like that.
I had read in these forums that the Navigation system was not up to par with respect to lack of features. I knew you couldn't select from a choice of routes, or decide between optimizing for speed or lack of tolls, etc. And I also had read that the big screen sometimes flaked out, redrew things, would have people drive in circles, etc. , but that the dashboard navigation was OK. I don't think I had read that the system was actually unreliable with respect to crazy routing. I really hope this is something that gets corrected in a future software release. It would be nice to be able to rely on the car's built in navigation system.
