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Post by rodge on Mar 13, 2018 5:54:10 GMT
Every time I use google maps, I like to try and beat the ETA.
This evening, over a 160 mile journey, I beat the ETA of 2 hrs and 44 minutes, by a full 30 minutes.
Not sure if it was because of traffic but that’s the best I’ve done on a journey that long.
Especially on a road that has normally got a lot of cops on it...
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Post by Deleted on Mar 13, 2018 7:11:12 GMT
Google maps is laughably optimistic in the UK. You'd need to be fly a helicopter to be able to beat the predicted driving times it come up with over here!
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Post by LandieMark on Mar 13, 2018 8:07:14 GMT
I find Google either fairly accurate or too conservative. TomTom is fairly conservative. I can beat their time by a good 20-30 minutes over a long journey from the original estimate. The TomTom is pretty good at re-evaluating its estimates though.
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Post by Martin on Mar 13, 2018 8:26:01 GMT
I used to play that game when I had a TomTom (pre live traffic) and in the 520d and pretty much always beat the eta by a decent margin. The current BMW eta is always pretty much spot on, even on 2-3 hour journeys it’s usually +/- 1-2mins.
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Post by Bob Sacamano v2.0 on Mar 13, 2018 8:44:20 GMT
I used to play that game when I had a TomTom (pre live traffic) and in the 520d and pretty much always beat the eta by a decent margin. The current BMW eta is always pretty much spot on, even on 2-3 hour journeys it’s usually +/- 1-2mins. Yes, the BMW is amazingly accurate, to the point where I don't even question it now. |
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Post by Blarno on Mar 13, 2018 8:56:54 GMT
It's pretty easy, really. Google assumes you are sticking to posted limits....
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Post by grampa on Mar 13, 2018 9:40:28 GMT
After the final demise of our trusty old Tom Tom, which I could generally beat (always interesting to see how it altered when in a traffic jam), I've just started using 'Here we go' on my phone instead - glad to say I can still beat it.
When I first used it, I was in a hurry having just downloaded it and didn't have time to work out it had American or English voice options - I felt like punching it everytime it told me to go straight on at the traffic circle!
Also strange that the American voice is a woman's but the English voice is a man's - I wonder at the psychology of that.
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Post by racingteatray on Mar 13, 2018 11:29:14 GMT
I used to play that game when I had a TomTom (pre live traffic) and in the 520d and pretty much always beat the eta by a decent margin. The current BMW eta is always pretty much spot on, even on 2-3 hour journeys it’s usually +/- 1-2mins. Yes, the BMW is amazingly accurate, to the point where I don't even question it now. Mine is, usually, often astoundingly so especially on our long European drives.
But with one bizarre exception: whenever we drive up to Suffolk to visit my mother, it routinely estimates (as have all its propeller-badged predecessors going back 9 years) that the journey will take half an hour longer than a lifetime's experience tells me it will. It's as if we encounter some fold in the space/time continuum somewhere on the A12 near Colchester where suddenly the system wakes up, lops off the offending half hour and goes back to accurate estimation.
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Post by Big Blue on Mar 13, 2018 13:04:21 GMT
Most are using traffic to reassess these days so the same journey on a Sunday morning will have a completely different estimate to that on Tuesday morning.
Another vote for the BMW system being ludicrously accurate despite (in mine) its now relative old-age.
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Post by franki68 on Mar 13, 2018 15:24:35 GMT
I only hear good things about the bmw say nav,but I must smell weird or something.
Mine is 3 years old so it’s not current but not ancient ,live traffic is active but it has never once diverted me and often left me stuck in traffic.
The final straw was I went back up to Manchester and went into the city centre and it took me on a weird route ,it told me to turn left down a road that had been pedestrianised for most of my life ,the error was compounded because as I couldn’t turn left there I had to drive on the tram lines .
So I only hear good things but my experience of it is awful.I use the Tom Tom app now in the bmw .
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Post by Martin on Mar 13, 2018 15:32:04 GMT
I only hear good things about the bmw say nav,but I must smell weird or something. Mine is 3 years old so it’s not current but not ancient ,live traffic is active but it has never once diverted me and often left me stuck in traffic. The final straw was I went back up to Manchester and went into the city centre and it took me on a weird route ,it told me to turn left down a road that had been pedestrianised for most of my life ,the error was compounded because as I couldn’t turn left there I had to drive on the tram lines . So I only hear good things but my experience of it is awful.I use the Tom Tom app now in the bmw . Does it say RTTI (real time traffic) on the screen? After 3 years the licence ends and it reverts back to the (terribly inaccurate) RDS based traffic. |
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Post by PetrolEd on Mar 13, 2018 15:58:44 GMT
I've now converted to Waze given my lack of faith in the basic business (is it still called that?)satnav in the BMW. The Porsche is better but still takes second place to Waze.
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Post by racingteatray on Mar 13, 2018 16:08:43 GMT
My wife likes Waze but I (a) dislike the interface and (b) it's not immune to weird route planning either. Plus I think every single Uber driver in London uses Waze so like as not you find yourself stuck behind a line of dithering Priuses.
The 2017-model year Pro Nav in my car seems to periodically update itself to newer software - the car's 15 months old now and I'd estimate that in that time I've received three messages on the nav screen that an update is available which requires the system to re-boot (very similar to what you do with an iPhone but rather quicker). It's noticeable - the graphics have changed with an added level of visual detail that wasn't there before.
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Post by Martin on Mar 13, 2018 16:12:35 GMT
Yes, you get free map updates with BMWs now which are automatic now the cars have 4g. Mine has 3G so updates have to be done via a USB and they’re not free either....
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Post by Alex on Mar 13, 2018 21:35:48 GMT
I’ve got the standard navy in the Golf and it’s difficult to beat because it rarely pics up any traffic problems so even during drives with reasonably light traffic I end up getting to my destination a few minutes behind the original estimate, but it is otherwise quite accurate and does pick up the more significant traffic problems. Google maps is much more accurate but only in real time. It’s easy to beat if you check it at 7am and set off to travel to the other end of the country as a lot of the traffic jams have gone by the time you get to them 4 hours later.
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Post by alf on Mar 16, 2018 17:14:59 GMT
The BMW map and traffic is TomTom's. All the different generations of device and map will have different ways of selecting and adjusting maps though.
TomTom are unique in breaking down a route into 100m segments and basing the ETA solely on real previous journey times at that time of day/day of the week. So the ETA is the average traffic speed. We can also see a lot more traffic than anyone else - even the other "LIVE" services use triangulated phone locations a lot (not very accurate) whereas TomTom now mostly use the tracking data from my side of TomTom, with 800,000 trackers in high mileage vehicles (most of them in Europe), plus our satnavs, we have a lot of very accurate positional data without needing the phone stuff.
RDS TMC traffic - as per the VW one mentioned - is utterly shite even compared with Google. It is slow to update and only picks up incidents on main roads (15% of the network).
Nothing is perfect though - Martin's example above must be a glaring map error somewhere! I recall a few of them on some routes I used to do regularly. The main bit where I always destroyed the ETA was the A43 past Silverstone, between the M1 and M40, I'm clearly somewhat faster than average traffic through there!
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Post by Roadsterstu on Mar 16, 2018 21:10:01 GMT
Yes, you get free map updates with BMWs now which are automatic now the cars have 4g. Mine has 3G so updates have to be done via a USB and they’re not free either.... Not even free to download online? That surprises me. Even Volvo have gone down that route for older Sensus equipped cars like mine, although it costsc80 odd quid for the dealer software update to allow the system to be updated by USB rather than buying new DVDs. |
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Post by Nelson on Mar 16, 2018 21:25:14 GMT
Every time I use google maps, I like to try and beat the ETA. This evening, over a 160 mile journey, I beat the ETA of 2 hrs and 44 minutes, by a full 30 minutes. Not sure if it was because of traffic but that’s the best I’ve done on a journey that long. Especially on a road that has normally got a lot of cops on it... Forgive if I'm wrong, but isn't the ETA based on how fast or slow you are moving and adjusts itself automatically and not based around real-time traffic? So, for example, at the start of a say a 150 mile journey the ETA would show 2hr 30mins perhaps, but if you set off slowly, say 20mph (i know you wouldn't) but wouldn't the ETA then show 7hrs 30 mins and then reduce as you sped up? |
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Post by Alex on Mar 17, 2018 8:26:42 GMT
Every time I use google maps, I like to try and beat the ETA. This evening, over a 160 mile journey, I beat the ETA of 2 hrs and 44 minutes, by a full 30 minutes. Not sure if it was because of traffic but that’s the best I’ve done on a journey that long. Especially on a road that has normally got a lot of cops on it... Forgive if I'm wrong, but isn't the ETA based on how fast or slow you are moving and adjusts itself automatically and not based around real-time traffic? So, for example, at the start of a say a 150 mile journey the ETA would show 2hr 30mins perhaps, but if you set off slowly, say 20mph (i know you wouldn't) but wouldn't the ETA then show 7hrs 30 mins and then reduce as you sped up? That’s never happened in any car ice driven. The VW system goes by known data of the speed limit of a road and seems to stick with that unless you slow down, but it won’t adjust the eta to assume you’ll be doing 20mph for the whole journey. |
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Post by Martin on Mar 17, 2018 8:58:18 GMT
Forgive if I'm wrong, but isn't the ETA based on how fast or slow you are moving and adjusts itself automatically and not based around real-time traffic? So, for example, at the start of a say a 150 mile journey the ETA would show 2hr 30mins perhaps, but if you set off slowly, say 20mph (i know you wouldn't) but wouldn't the ETA then show 7hrs 30 mins and then reduce as you sped up? That’s never happened in any car ice driven. The VW system goes by known data of the speed limit of a road and seems to stick with that unless you slow down, but it won’t adjust the eta to assume you’ll be doing 20mph for the whole journey. Yep. The eta will increase as you’re driving slower than expected, but only as go along (unless there is traffic ahead) Alex - Does the VW Sat Nav just use RDS Data and it is the same on the upgraded unit? |
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Post by Alex on Mar 17, 2018 9:15:26 GMT
That’s never happened in any car ice driven. The VW system goes by known data of the speed limit of a road and seems to stick with that unless you slow down, but it won’t adjust the eta to assume you’ll be doing 20mph for the whole journey. Yep. The eta will increase as you’re driving slower than expected, but only as go along (unless there is traffic ahead) Alex - Does the VW Sat Nav just use RDS Data and it is the same on the upgraded unit? Yes just RDS which only covers accidents, incidents or road closures plus the odd major tailback. Trouble is when it does pick something up it tends to try to reroute you along an alternative clear route which, during rush-hour, also tends to be clogged up. So I tend to ignore it and go on instinct! |
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Post by Martin on Mar 17, 2018 10:26:28 GMT
Yep. The eta will increase as you’re driving slower than expected, but only as go along (unless there is traffic ahead) Alex - Does the VW Sat Nav just use RDS Data and it is the same on the upgraded unit? Yes just RDS which only covers accidents, incidents or road closures plus the odd major tailback. Trouble is when it does pick something up it tends to try to reroute you along an alternative clear route which, during rush-hour, also tends to be clogged up. So I tend to ignore it and go on instinct! Not ideal. Just looked at the brochure and it says you get ‘Car-Net Guide and Inform’, which is supposed to include live traffic updates. Isn’t that any good either? |
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Post by Alex on Mar 17, 2018 15:13:23 GMT
Yes just RDS which only covers accidents, incidents or road closures plus the odd major tailback. Trouble is when it does pick something up it tends to try to reroute you along an alternative clear route which, during rush-hour, also tends to be clogged up. So I tend to ignore it and go on instinct! Not ideal. Just looked at the brochure and it says you get ‘Car-Net Guide and Inform’, which is supposed to include live traffic updates. Isn’t that any good either? I haven’t ever been able to get it to work. I believe you need to either pay extra to have Car-net App Connect, which gives you the requisite internet connection or otherwise it requires a plug in WLAN device but it’s not entirely clear if this means a standard Wifi dongle or a VW one. You can then use an app on your phone to look up destinations and have them sent to your car. Easier to get out the phone and just use google maps to find an address! |
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Post by PG on Mar 22, 2018 13:39:13 GMT
I find the Jag sat nav ridiculously optimistic when you start a journey, but after about 15 minutes it seems to sort itself out. Until you get to within about 5 miles of your destination and then it become stupid again. It only has RDS traffic that I've switched off.
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