For many years post-smartphone I did still use the integrated GPS in our cars. Even though the data and UI was generally (not universally) worse, having it on the comparatively big screen in a central spot, controlling it with the steering wheel controls, and not having it consume phone battery, outweighed the other factors for me. Then came CarPlay and Android Auto and those reason vanished.

I have no experience with tom tom but I was a garmin user, and I got the sense that tom toms were pretty much identical. IMO an integrated tom tom into the car, if it performs as well as the external unit, would be amazingly better than your cell phone. The biggest advantage imo is satellite coverage is much better than quality data network coverage. I'm not even talking about in the boonies. Plenty of times in the middle of LA county I am sitting there waiting on a seemingly stalled LTE connection to render a map I supposedly had already cached locally according to google maps.

I have an older in-car system and my experience is the opposite.

First, the car doesn't download map data. I'm stuck with what was on the car when I bought it unless I want to pay an unreasonable amount to update it.

Second, it does download traffic data, but it's so slow that it's useless. I took its advice once and it cost me over an hour, because the alternate route had already filled up and had the disadvantage of not being a freeway.

Third, it can't navigate a path without connecting to the satellite (seemingly for traffic data, but possibly it isn't even calculating the path locally). So when I visit downtown SF, don't have up-to-date maps, and I'm inevitably behind some building blocking my southern view, it just abandons me.

> Third, it can't navigate a path without connecting to the satellite (seemingly for traffic data, but possibly it isn't even calculating the path locally).

I’m confused by what you are saying here. In-car navigation use satelites to know where the car is. If it can’t path plan without satelite connection then that is most likely because it is waiting for a localisation fix.

Trafic information could be coming through satelite broadcast but I doubt that it does.

There is no way that a navigation tool would receive path planning through satelite. Two way communication is much more complicated than one-way reception, and there is no way it would be financially worth doing that.

Sirius sells traffic info add-on, which is broadcast from the satellite. It is not as detailed as the data-linked apps in cars/phones and is only available for the few big metros but can get the traffic info on an older car's nav system.

See my response to the sibling poster: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31587520

Don't forget the best part -- if you do want to update the maps they want to charge you 300+ dollars every year!

Is that an exorbitant amount of money for maintaining a (global?) digital map? Google messes up our sense of value with their ad money.

>Is that an exorbitant amount of money for maintaining a (global?) digital map?

Absolutely - Google is just one player, Apple Maps, Bing Maps, OSM.

Charging consumers 300$/year for map updates would never work even if free offerings didn't exist - they are just targeting a small niche and optimizing (ie. even if they made the price 30$/year most people would still use phone maps so they might as well milk the market that wants to pay for their solution as high as they can). If there were no free competitors someone would drive the mass market price down way lower than 300$.

Considering standalone GPS units used to charge like 50 bucks (and now I think a lot of them charge nothing/bake it into the up front cost) yeah I'd say so. Garmin currently charges something like 100 bucks for their updates based on some quick searching.

The built in unit for your car is a captive market, they're definitely gouging. Especially nowadays when it's almost impossible to replace them with an aftermarket unit due to how integrated they have become.

>First, the car doesn't download map data. I'm stuck with what was on the car when I bought it unless I want to pay an unreasonable amount to update it.

Apparently car navigation maps are a thing that you can also pirate. I think I saw a Windows tool for downloading Mercedes-Benz map updates. Never tried it though, since I was pretty content to sticking with Google Maps and a phone mount.

My car manufacturer just posts an update every year that I can tranfer myself to the SD card that it reads off. Pretty nice.

The in-car GPS systems are a disaster (because the car manufacturers see them as "cash after sale") but the separate/dedicated GPS units are pretty good.

The updates and traffic information is, or at least was, free.

> Third, it can't navigate a path without connecting to the satellite

How else would it work? Just sense which way the wheels are pointing and track the speedometer?

I perhaps should have said find rather than navigate. I don't expect turn-by-turn navigation when it has no way of knowing where I am. I'm not talking about it directing me along a path; but about finding the path in the first place.

It should use the last known location and vector to find a route. It doesn't. My guess is that it loses the satellite, sees it again and starts recalculating, loses it, and repeats this cycle. Unless the satellite is visible for a long enough period, it never produces any path. Even an out-of-date path would be more useful than simply nothing.

That, of course, is called dead reckoning and some GPSes have it, but I wouldn't trust it for very long. [1] I'm not sure what cgriswald is on about. Maybe he just lives in a tunnel or some dead zone, because I've never lost satellite connections. Maybe cellphones can triangulate via cell towers? But how is he getting cell data in his tunnel?

[1] Pre-GPS systems used this https://ndrive.com/brief-history-gps-car-navigation/

When I lose navigation I just do without. I haven't replaced it with Google or any other cell-based app. The satellite radio often also drops out in these moments despite having a buffer.

Edit: Ah, I see, I meant something sort of other than that read. I've certainly had the experience of not being able to download maps, but mostly on hikes in the middle of nowhere. When I use navigation on foot in the city, hadn't had the problems I have with in-car nav.

CarPlay, at least (and I kinda assume Android Auto) uses the car's built-in GPS receiver when available. Doesn't necessarily solve the non-cached maps when LTE is unavailable problem, though.

I'm the total opposite. I love my in-car nav. I have a shortcut on the steering wheel that brings up a list of recent destinations, so starting it takes literally seconds. I don't have to plug in my phone, or even look at it. I get turn by turn in the binnacle AND the heads-up display. And on top of that, it _doesn't_ do all the silly stuff that Google does to make people think it's so great, like routing me through some residential neighborhood to save 45 seconds. I'm okay taking one freeway vs another, maybe (I don't like adding miles to my trip), but that's about as smart as I want my navigation to be.

Maybe this is because I don't commute by car though. If I get stuck in traffic, it's the one time that month, and I've probably got a podcast on anyway.

With Android Auto I can save time by starting navigation before I even get into the car. And it does clearly show how much time alternate routes will save, so it's easy to see when a detour through a residential neighborhood isn't worth the hassle.

> I don't have to plug in my phone, or even look at it. I get turn by turn in the binnacle AND the heads-up display. And on top of that, it _doesn't_ do all the silly stuff that Google does to make people think it's so great, like routing me through some residential neighborhood to save 45 seconds.

Apple CarPlay + Apple Maps checks all of those boxes in my car.

I don't get it. You don't have to look at your phone and you get turn-by-turn in your HUD by using Apple Maps?

Correct. Many new vehicles integrate the CarPlay APIs into the vehicle quite well. And it has wireless carplay, so I don't even take the phone out of my pocket. It just auto-connects when I start the car. I press the voice command button on my steering wheel, tell Siri to navigate somewhere, and all of the navigation displays (hud/cluster/infotainment display) in my car display the directions that Apple Maps is spitting out. It works identically to the way a factory nav would otherwise work.

I was traveling with some friends through Los Gatos on the way to Monterrey and Google had me sit in a residential neighborhood traffic jam for over 45 minutes when I could've turned left and gotten to my destination much quicker. I did end up turning left, but the takeaway that I had is that Google isn't always doing the "right" thing.

There is a particular problem in Los Gatos on summer weekends when everyone wants to escape the Bay Area and go to the beaches around Santa Cruz. Southbound Highway 17 comes to standstill due to idiot timid drivers who slow down going uphill and constantly brake around curves. Then the navigation apps route drivers onto residential streets to try and save a few minutes. It gets so bad that local residents are literally trapped and even emergency vehicles can't get through.

https://www.losgatosca.gov/2488/Beach-Traffic

> ... constantly breaking around curves.

What a drag.

Yeah, what a bunch of assholes.

It became a 45 minute traffic jam because Google directed everyone there. Maybe.

Anecdotally, Waze is (or at least was) better. It would try and redirect traffic to avoid too much congestion. So it would send you over the highway and me over smaller roads in a roundabout way, if possible.

Mind you, I've never seen this properly confirmed :)

I remember TomTom being a lot better than the competition, though. Most other units were terribly slow and sometimes borderline unusable. Not to mention the updates... not software updates, but the map updates. I still remember my parents, with the help of my siblings, spending weeks trying update their cheap Chinese GPS using instructions from random internet forums, only to give up and get a more expensive TomTom unit. The Chinese unit was given away at a Facebook group to someone more adventurous.

Of course, mobile apps have definitely caught up years ago, and I believe you that they're even better now.

> I've never used our in-car GPS (other than playing with it once).

You bought it. That's enough for them.

> If it was any good it has a ton of advantages over using Google, including display on the "speedometer" screen.

Just as a quick note, when I use Apple Maps via CarPlay on my 2020 Subaru it does display the next turn on the instrument cluster. This doesn't work with Google Maps via CarPlay, so it might be a private CarPlay API that only Apple's first-party apps can use.

I am opposite, I used Android auto once and it was inferior to the car's own: audio distortions, choppy display, takes a while before it figures orientation of the car, does not show in the instrument display and HUD, directions timing is off etc. Distortion and choppiness seem to come from the whatever protocol it uses to communicate with the car, Google Maps on the same phone are pretty smooth.

The car's maps are not as up to date as Google's - they miss some road closures, do not have some businesses names so need to enter address (or can just send a location from Google Map to the car), sometimes believe a street is one-way even if it is not or try to make a turn that does not exist any more but I can deal with an occasional glitch every few months instead of dealing with the inferior UI all the time.

+1 for "pants". Very retro.