Quote:
Originally Posted by eaglesrest
Quote:
Originally Posted by 902
Google maps traffic is a million times better than the BMW maps. I've had the BMW maps take me through a road with construction on it and it showed it as clear, while google maps wanted to me to take another route to avoid the construction traffic.
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As I understand it, in the UK RTTI traffic is provided by TomTom, as is the mapping data. In my experience TomTom traffic is superior to google traffic.
However, it doesn't matter how good the traffic data is if the navigation sw doesn't know what to do with it efficiently. Like you say, idrive nav makes some poor routing decisions.
I've had TT and idrive nav running alongside each other. Both show the same traffic delays, updating within a couple of mins of each other (same source). The difference is that TT makes logical rerouting decisions, and idrive more often than not, just drives you into the known traffic, or reroutes inefficiently.
I don't rate google maps for in-car navigation. It's free and has amazing points of interest/mapping, but the visual display is confusing, no speed limit info and no speed camera info. It also has very limited configuration. I used it in Crete on hols and it was awful. The road names are long so it would often be 30 seconds behind with audible instructions, directly conflicting with the visual instructions. Other navs allow road name pronunciation to be turned off. It also only used about 10% of the display for the actual direction mapping and the rest of the screen was wasted. I think this is a regional issue as it doesn't do that in the UK, but it made navigating with it almost impossible. TomTom on the other hand was a breeze. |
Maybe that's true in some places, like you say in the UK. But in Canada, I don't remember seeing any traffic data on the iDrive map at all. And yes, I do have the option turned on.
Google maps will always have much more data than anyone else just because of the huge number of devices they are able to pull the data from. So it will always be the most accurate and the fastest to update.
I know that google maps just recently got an update that shows the speed limit info in some places. I just don't think that feature has made its way to the CarPlay app yet though. But the point is that it keeps getting update with new features all the time.