New satnavs cut an impressive dash

Becker Map Pilot sits in the boot of your Mercedes Benz and uses the car's own built-in display.

Becker Map Pilot sits in the boot of your Mercedes Benz and uses the car's own built-in display.

Published Aug 30, 2011

Share

It's already hard to remember what life was like before satnav came along. Dog-eared atlases in every car’s glove compartment. Gormless strangers shrugging their shoulders as you asked for directions. Illegible sketch maps that were supposed to get you to a friend's party but didn't, and map-reading arguments that tested the strongest marriages. It's so much easier now - just punch in an address and away you go. That's it.

It's not all good news, of course. You don't have to be a geography teacher to worry that if we stop looking at maps, we'll lose our sense of place. Then there are those sometimes hilarious, sometimes tragic “satnav made me do it” disaster stories.

Drivers of articulated lorries who ended up wedging their 44-tonners between ancient stone walls on narrow roads in pretty villages. Dim motorists who dutifully drove their cars into rivers because they didn't have the gumption to take the instructions with a pinch of salt.

If you're wondering, women are more likely to obey satnav commands without question than men, according to a survey published recently by Swinton Insurance - although it's not clear whether that makes them more susceptible to extreme “prat-nav” error.

Overall, though, satnav has been an overwhelming plus for drivers - and it's constantly been getting better. As recently as 2005, car manufacturers such as BMW were still charging more than R11 500 for factory-fitted units that didn't even have a map display, but relied instead on arrow prompts and voice instructions.

Owners of expensive cars sometimes found they had to make a choice between using their satnav or listening to their favourite music, because their dash-mounted DVD drives could handle either a music CD or a disc containing navigation data, but not both at the same time.

Some of the clunkier built-in systems were rapidly swept away as satnav specialists such as TomTom, Garmin and Navman piled in with devices that cost a fraction of the price, for those who don't mind sucker marks sullying their windscreens and cables cluttering dashboards.

There turned out to be rather a lot of those, so for a few years, satnavs sold in huge numbers as every feature imaginable was added in order to fuel demand. Bluetooth and the ability to play MP3 files, live updates of traffic conditions and “points of interest” databases allowing you to find, say, your nearest supermarket or restaurant, were just a few examples.

Then market saturation and a weakening economy finally brought an end to the party. In the first quarter of 2009, TomTom sold 29 percent fewer units than it had in the first three months of 2008, a stunning reversal when set against the strong growth that had preceded it.

But it wasn't just the market that turned against the specialised satnav makers - it was technology as well. It's no coincidence that satnav burst onto the scene at about the same time as affordable mobile phones and the web. All were helped by common factors such as the advent of cheap computing power and the opening up to the civilian market of technology that had previously been the preserve of the US military.

For several years computers, satnavs and cellphones lived separate lives - but then things started to change. First the dividing line between cellphones and internet-based computing blurred with smartphones. Then the boundaries between satnav and the rest started to crumble, a development that posed a challenge for the navigation companies.

Mobile handsets already contained a lot of computing power and location technology, so navigation aids were an obvious add-on. Take the cellphone makers' huge economies of scale and experience of designing desirable consumer electronics products as well, and you have a potent threat to TomTom and the rest.

The navigation companies have tried to blunt that threat by themselves offering to provide the relevant technology on mobile handsets. Go to Apple's App Store and you can download iPhone apps from Garmin, TomTom or Navigon providing nationwide coverage for R450-R550, prices that compare favourably with even the cheapest stand-alone satnavs.

The bigger threat though, is from cheaper or free alternatives such as Google Maps Navigation for Android-based devices - although the cost of data downloads for phone-based navigation is a factor in this area, too.

That leaves customers with a wide of choice of excellent navigation options - built-in systems, stand-alone aftermarket devices and phone-based solutions - all at much lower prices than the less capable equivalents of a few years ago.

And we're not finished yet; car manufacturers and satnav makers are finally getting together to combine the best features of easy-to-use but expensive and inflexible built-in satnav and the cheap, feature-rich but untidy, cable-trailing aftermarket units.

The solution lies in well-designed dash-top brackets that allow drivers to use standard units without windscreen suckers and unsightly cables - Seat and Renault have led the way here. Mercedes has gone a step further by providing for Becker Traffic Pro sat-navs, which are considerably cheaper than the company's own full-blown in-built systems, to use its cars' large in-dash displays to show navigation maps.

But, good as today's systems are, there's the prospect of something very much better. What if the satnav of the future, instead of directing you from A to B, could tell you everything about the buildings and natural landmarks you see along the way, identify the wild flowers on the roadside verges, or recommend the best restaurants you will pass between midday and 2pm, so that you know where to stop for lunch?

If the technology that's already starting to go into our cars - location technology, computing power, internet access and so on - can be combined in a sensible way, it's all within our grasp. - The Independent

Related Topics: