It’s a great shame Jaguar didn’t issue a proper set of instructions with the SatNav. Of all the driver-interface systems in the darn vehicle, the Nav is the most superb. But without knowing what setting there are, and which do what… you may as well have thrown your money away.
I drive in NY, from suburbs with dirt roads, to menacing city with uncooperative fellow drivers and re-paving being done everywhere. Traffic jams occur, threaten to delay 20 minutes, then melt away in 5 minutes… it’s about as challenging as any driving environment in the overly-developed countries.
Once I had mine set to what’s required, and tweaked to the little settings I personally prefer,… now I cruise through commuter traffic like British James Bond. Other drivers look at me like “where the heck is that guy going? There’s no road out there that gets you to Rte 680---he must be a jerk”. But, amazingly even to myself, the SatNav puts me on a circuit of unnamed roads that bypass the traffic problem every time. I’m smiling.
But the SatNav suffers severely because of THREE things, and the first I’ve just mentioned: NO operating instructions. I can get over that, but it is truly a crime, for a system that’s worth being proud of.
The second thing is the TMC it relies on for its incoming traffic reports. Depending on what city/town you drive in, the TMC may not be very detailed and spot-on about what’s happening on the roads. (check out this explanation of what the TMC is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_message_channel ). I can understand how each state will vary about having a super-fast operable TMC grid on their highways (TMC service is provided by private companies from state to state), so I can accept that NY may have a better TMC service than where other drivers live.
The third is a the thing that I can’t accept: the mapping is Google-based here in the US. If you’ve ever googled your own home address or place of business, you can see by the photo images how years-behind some of Google’s map information is. We are all impressed by Google-map, Google-Earth, etc,… but Gee, when do those guys ever update their info? My house hasn’t looked like that since 2003, and the last gas station I was directed to was boarded up out-of-business 3 years ago, and the one before that changed its brand name 2 years ago.
If Google info is old, no matter how much you update your SD card, your map is ancient.
We should put together a SatNav tutorial on one of these forums. Once you get to know the operation of it, it is a friendly as Ms Moneypenny in the codriver's seat of Bond's Aston Martin.
