rhuffman24

Guys, NAVI is the worst thing in the TL. I pretty much agree with this whole thread, but indulge me so I can whine about the latest: Looking for "Mount Royal Lane" , want to navigate to a street address there in the DC area this weekend. That's a nav issue, not yellow pages. So, it doesn't exist... Until, and here's the amazing part... until I put it in as "Mt. Royal Lane" See the abbreviation?? Whas up wit dat?

Acura and Alpine engineers, can you at least try to keep up with current SOTA aftermarket nav systems? The TL NAVI is so much improved over the last few years (I've owned a 2001 and 2004, both with NAVI), but it's still so screwy.

It would be oh-so-helpful if a real User's Guide was available, showing how to use the system as real people do, and need to, use it. I understand the Yellow Pages argument, but I think Acura missed the boat, most people would want to rely on that kind of information before they push off. That's why aftermarket has routine and regular POI updates. In my earlier TLs, I finally started to rely on having a YP in the car! Come on Acura, you're better than that.

NewTL2007

This is the main reason why I got my TL 07 with no NAV, GARMIN PDA works great fo me, when I search by name the default option "Near Current Location", very simple.

Cap'n Ken

The issue of "Mount" vs. "Mt." is a tough one to solve in a listing-based system. Google Maps and other online services are search-based, so when you put "Mount" in there, it can associate that with a search for "Mt.". A limitation to the approach of device-based navigation, and we're all spoiled with the functionality of online mapping these days.

Simply put, OEM systems and standalone GPS devices are behind in their technology compared to online systems. I don't know if Acura's OEM update might someday include a better program as well as map updates, but that would be a good idea.

Overall, I think the navi works very well, but there are a lot of things to find less than perfect about it. We're spoiled by the alternatives, I guess.


Yeah, the standalone devices tend to perform very well. In large part that's because of competition. Just like car stereos, the better functionality is usually found in the aftermarket because of competition among manufacturers. That simply doesn't exist in the OEM world.

The issue with aftermarket GPS is that you have to put it somewhere. I have a TomTom-powered Bluetooth system that works with my Treo, and it's a great system. But I decided that having a built-in, large-screen navi was enough of an advantage that I'd get it in the TL and deal with the system issues.

rhuffman24

Cap'n Ken, thoughtful and useful answer. And, I agree, the disadvantages are clearly outweighed by the advantages of the onboard NAVI. It is, however, annoying that with all the technology Acura built in, just a bit more would have given users/drivers the flexibility to make a rather large leap in functionality, in several areas. I would be very interested to know how Acura makes their decisions: how to determine the good idea cutoff point? Sensitivity analysis (i.e., additional functionality vs cost). And from a larger POV - and out of scope for this thread - how do they determine their vehicle design, both from shape/form, to function and content? How much HP is too much/not enough? Who is lurking on this board from Acura?

NewTL2007

One more thing, I do strongly believe, having "build in" NAV is useless and distracting in daily driving.

NewTL2007

How often do you really need to use NAV? How about "trip planning" functionality, can this be done remotely from my bedroom?

evantec

That's why it's great that a lot of the automakers got behind the idea of using Bluetooth. It's not tied-down to one technology too heavily. Imagine if you were stuck with one cellular provider because your car was hard-wired for Verizon, Cingular or Sprint? Or you couldn't use your car-phone because it was hard-wired for Analog cell service, and the carriers were all going digital?

As it is, the fact the the pre-07 TLs can't sync the phonebook is a nuisance. And a lot of the features of specific phones (like PTT or distinctive ringers) still don't filter into the car's HandsFreeLink.

Again, for that big-picture question -- the Acura comes with nearly everything standard, instead of giving you a lot of a-la-carte options. While not having a choice of NAVI systems makes the buying decision easier (either yes-or-no), it means you don't have the chance to get a better factory NAVI system. You can only hope that Acura tries to keep their system competitive (e.g. hopefully by watching what after-market products people are buying, or what features other cars have).

As for who is lurking -- not me -- I work in a completely different field than the auto industry. But I hope someone from Acura is reading these threads so they can see what everyone wants and doesn't want.

JLondon

It's a good thing this is MY WIFE's '06 TL because the NAVI system absolutely blows!!...and I'd rip it out if this was my daily driver I can't agree more with brooklynite and TLmnop. Geez, I'm sitting in a 10 year old Home Depot parking lot and the NAVI can't even find it by using the idiotic Category, Name, sort by distance...or was it Category, Keyword, Name, Place, sort by distance...blah, blah, blah. As TLmnop points out, this is a simple programming issue whereby you input the Name and it sorts by default to the closest based on existing GPS position....That's the way my TomTom GO works. none of this BS with having to go 4 menu items deep just to locate the closest Dunkin' Donuts!!!

Compound this with the crappy HFL, and "ItBlows"tooth that can't recognize a number from anyone's voice

mike03a3

I'm really amused that some are attempting to defend the TL's NAVI system. Even the latest version in my new '07 TL-S is pitiful compared to my initial production run Garmin Quest when it comes to finding points of interest. Several have said yoou need to initialize your state so it won't come up with a McDonalds 2300 miles away instead of the one two blocks away that you're trying to find. Come on guys, it's a GPS system - why on earth should you have to tell it where to look. The default should be "nearby", like my Garmin. Having to enter city or state makes sense if you're looking for a POI in another area, but most of the time we are looking for the closest one.

I've virtually given up trying to find any business with it - it's just plain bad at it. Most of the time I can't figure out if the places are in the database at all - you sure don't get many icons displayed.

This isn't a basic hardware flaw - it's a combination of a weak database and poorly written software - both of which are fixable.

Acura needs to get on Alpine and Navteq to get with the program.

JLondon

There's a silver lining to everything. Since my wife has seen how crappy the OEM GPS system is in her brand new '06 TL, she's decided not to bust my chops about getting the OEM GPS in what is probably going to be my next daily driver...2007 BMW 335i Coupe, to replace my 2000 328Ci with 140,000 miles.

I'll stay away from the built in GPS and iDrive

JLondon

bump...

msingh

Have to agree with the comments in this thread so far:

1) The NAVI is much better than systems I have seen in other cars.
2) The NAVI is much worse than standalone GPS systems. The database is so out of date that a post office built 5 years ago doesn't show up and a gas station is listed as being downtown which hasn't been there for 15 years!
3) Searching for a "business" plain doesn't work. There is no excuse for it - this is a software problem plain and simple. The engineers seem to have used a Category index to speed up searches on the database (a decent enough idea) but as someone else pointed out, businesses aren't correctly categorized all the time.

What could be interesting is the fact that the entire system (GPS, HFL, Voice) is all contained in the box in the trunk. Swap out the unit and you have an entirely new system. Certainly you should be able to do this with the 2007 system if you wanted to. The question is, what do you do with the old one after spending another $2k?!!

Did I get what I paid for? Well in a way - about 85%. Enough for a lawsuit? Possibly - amazing what people sue for and win - but is it really worth the hassle is the question.

mike03a3

Swapping for the 2007 version isn't going to help - it can't find a business when you're in their parking lot.

Cap'n Ken

Given the state of our litigious society, you may be right that a lawsuit could be successful, but come on. We're talking about functionality we don't like. The product works, just not in some ways that are completely satisfactory.

That's like saying you're going to sue TiVo because you don't like the way their search works.

Will Y.

I disagree, and think the TL's pre-'07 Navi is pretty good. To find the nearest [category], just select the locate "by distance" and it will pull everything up.
unfortunately, the mistakes I have found are all less-than-predictable human-data entry related, like misspellings, failures to properly categorize and new addresses. For example, I searched for "Hop Li Seafood" restaurants to see if the West LA location was in the database. It's a group of 3 Chinese restaurants, but none of them show up in the "Chinese" category. Two of the three locatons are found under "Seafood" rather than "Chinese." A name search within "restaurants" did pull up all three locations, including one that was opened a couple of years ago in Marina del Rey.
For a business, generally "category" and then "name" works pretty well, or do the "locate by distance."

DMZ

Gee, I wonder if the '07 Navi will also say "MAKE U-TURN, DESTINATION IS ON THE LEFT"
when I hit [Go Home] sitting right in front of my home....like my '04`does?!?!?

tenuki

As a programmer, I have to shake my head at their search implementation. The category "segmentation" seems somewhat asinine.

mike03a3

Disagree all you want, but the Navi in my TL-S can't find the nearest Wal-Mart, Home Depot or Costco to my house, even after searching through the 11 categories of Wal-Mart, 6 of Home Depot and 9 of Costco (counting the categories under Costco Warehouse. My first generation Garmin Quest brings all of them right up.

The basic problem is the idiot categories. If you could just search by name, sorted by nearest it might help. But a lot of stores just plain don't seem to be in there (or I haven't yet figured out how they are mis-identified.)

The Navi seem to work very well at navigating to an address, but the name search is just plain unforgivably bad.

DMZ

As a fellow programmer, I can say you're 100% RIGHT.

Whether you search for McDonald's, Home Depot, Fredricks of Hollywood, etc., the system should take into account where you are and come up with the closest location automatically. This by category nonsense is pure BS!

Pika817

Not that I'm aware of - it just tells you that it's on the left.

One of the things that annoy me the most about the NAVI is that it doesn't have an option for you to wind up at your destination if is on the other side of the street. It would be nice if it had a button you can press and it would plot a path to loop around the block and wind up at the right place.

This is especially annoying when I'm downtown, as there is a maze of one way streets and doing a U turn isn't feasible - especially with the TL's turning circle.

06si6spd

How the hell do you find Wal-Mart, Costco, Sams club anything for that matter in my 05 TL with. Hell I have this damn thing mentioning CA and Canada when I am a block from all three stores here in MI. I thought possibly the 07 DVD would help--Sucks just as bad. My 7 year old daughter gets a kick out of every time I try finding something and it lists stores hundreds if not thousands of miles away. I set my home location to MI. What use is vacinity, if it randomly spits out locations hundreds of miles away. I have to drive around with a damn yellow pages in my car with hopes that the phone number MIGHT show up every now and than.

06si6spd

How the hell do you find Wal-Mart, Costco, Sams club anything for that matter in my 05 TL with navigation. Hell I have this damn thing mentioning CA and Canada when I am a block from all three stores here in MI. I thought possibly the 07 DVD would help--Sucks just as bad. My 7 year old daughter gets a kick out of every time I try finding something and it lists stores hundreds if not thousands of miles away. I set my home location to MI. What use is vacinity, if it randomly spits out locations hundreds of miles away. I have to drive around with a damn yellow pages in my car with hopes that the phone number MIGHT show up every now and than.

06si6spd

How the hell do you find Wal-Mart, Costco, Sams club anything for that matter in my 05 TL with navigation. Hell I have this damn thing mentioning CA and Canada when I am a block from all three stores here in MI. I thought possibly the 07 DVD would help--Sucks just as bad. My 7 year old daughter gets a kick out of every time I try finding something and it lists stores hundreds if not thousands of miles away. I set my home location to MI. What use is vacinity, if it randomly spits out locations hundreds of miles away. I have to drive around with a damn yellow pages in my car with hopes that the phone number MIGHT show up every now and than.

rhuffman24

Ok, that's just quite enough.

At first, I thought it was me. My '07 TL-S is the third TL I've owned, previous being an '01 and an '04. Maybe I've gotten smarter (unlikely), or those NAVI systems were better. It is clear now that the 07 system cannot be used by anyone in the way it should be used. This has gone beyond laughable, beyond ridiculous, beyond excusable. Someone, from a position of knowledge and responsibility, must step in and take action in one or more of three possibilities:

1. How, when the cream of the Acura customer base cannot understand how to use a customer/user-centric system, the latest NAVI was intended to be used. Respond to this thread's concerns and issues.

2. Mea culpa - explain how Acura stumbled into this serious misstep, and what will be done to correct it.

3. Do nothing. Continue to lurk on and within these forums as if no issue exists with an electronic system, one for which we are charged 5% MSRP, one which cannot emulate the functionality of much simpler systems costing 80% less.

Acura, I look forward to your action as a good corporate citizen, as a customer-centric firm, and as a world class manufacturer that values repeat business.

mike03a3

Buy a Garmin Quest. It'll fit in your shirt pocket, it's easy to find all the points of interest, firmware updates are free, annual amp database updates are $75 and it's a bunch easier to carry in the car than the yellow pages. Once it gives you the address, you can let the car's Navi take you there. I have a Quest for my motorcycle, but when I'm going to be going to multiple locations, or looking at multiple stores, I take the Quest with me in the Acura. How sad is that?

JLondon

Exactly...my TomTom is superior to this NAVI.

redchief

My wife does occassional work for the local hospice and has to find specific addresses accurately and quickly. Some destinations have someone in great pain, most have no real need to hurry. So far, it has taken her flawlessly from one address to another. It's made a sometimes difficult job much easier.

DMZ

Verrrry friggin sad .....................

Acura should be ashamed of themselves for this.

reisb

I was pretty upset in my search for Best Buy because of all the subcatagories and finally found the store was under "Office Supplies/Electronics" and not some of the others that showed electronics.

I then read the user's manual actually looking to see if there was a way to have the HFL NOT dial 1 prior to it's number dialed if you select "call" from the destination screen once you found your dest. (still haven't figured this out), but it says for Restaurants and shopping, select.....

....All Shopping or All Restaurant types as some may be in wrong catagory. I tried that today and it works great.

Choose destination by places, category, shopping, all shopping, closest distance, "Best Buy", and it brings up the nearest Best Buy to me.

I feel much better now.

Mall still kind of suck because it brings up all department stores too.

mike03a3

I got all excited when I saw this, ran outside and tried it. No Joy.

It didn't find the three Home Depots closest to my home, the two closest Costcos, or the nearest Wal-Mart. It's official, it still sucks.

reisb

Sorry. Guess it depends on the area. I went and checked after I read yours and it did not find nearest Wal-mart (which has been here a while), but it did find nearest Lowe's, and new Tweeter. Oh well. Better than nothing I guess.

JLondon

Wrong...I'd rather have nothing and have saved the money for this POS NAVI.

levon1830

So does anyone in this thread have an '07 TL w/ navi that can comment on whether or not the search feature has been greatly improved over the system in the '04 -'06 TLs?

SANS-TLS

a lot of this stuff is still wrong with the new ones cant find the Walmart down the block (3 years old) but will find the new pollo tropical , not sure how it is updated...it does get a bit frustrating when it shows place a few thousand miles away

finoa

I bought my 05 TL in December 04 and I thought the Navi would be a somewhat useless gadget. It has turned out to be much more handy than I thought it would, albeit much less than ideal.

I used to work for Dun & Bradstreet (which has built a database of businesses, all types, all sizes, in about 200 countries). The dynamics with which businesses move, go out of business, change phone numbers, change names, etc. is vastly under-estimated by the layman. For my clients to get reliable information on their own customers and prospects, we recommend AT LEAST quarterly refreshes of the database, preferrably monthly.

Considering that the data our TL Navi systems use are static and at that, more than a couple years old, it's inevitable that Navi can't find all the businesses you want it to find. IN this respect, I was much more tolerant when Navi couldn't find what I wanted. It's much better at finding addresses, which DON'T change that often (of course the address will stay the same regardless of what business resides there so the success rate is greater). I countered this shortcoming by dialing 411, getting the address, and plugging that into the navi. For the most part, easy as pie.

The part that does steam me up is that the categories that Acura has used to classify businesses are simply not descriptive, flexible, or accurate enough to find the businesses that it does have in the database. Sort by distance generally works but not always because if you used the wrong category, the business you're looking for simply won't be there because it's been filtered out. Then you have to start out all over in a new category.

Additionally, the search engine that Navi uses is incredibly unforgivable and rigid. "Hooter's" for example. No place to enter the apostrophe or wild card so the nearest Hooter's my Navi brought up was a couple thousand miles away. If you enter "Hooter" I got a whole different set of results that weren't what I was looking for.

ACURA, YOU NEED TO FIX THIS.

Cap'n Ken

Take a look at some of the GPS devices coming out of CES this week. Notable is the Dash unit that talks to Yahoo Local for its POI data:

http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/03/d...search-to-gps/

This is where POI data needs to go - leverage Bluetooth, WiFi and wireless phone networks to get information online; don't burn POI data to a DVD. It'll take longer for OEM systems to incorporate this kind of stuff because they don't compete directly for consumer dollars like the stand-alones do. Couple that with development lead times for OEM and the ever-changing landscape of online search (if Acura's GPS partner cuts a deal with Yahoo today to incorporate this, it's probably two years before it gets in a car and there has to be some assurance that the service won't change functionality for 5-7 years after that), and the stand-alones are always likely to have better functionality than the OEM systems.

Last weekend I was out hunting for some things and needed to find a Best Buy. I knew there was a new one somewhere close to where I was that wouldn't be in the Acura GPS, so I used Google Maps on my phone (Helio Drift - GPS enabled) and just searched for 'Best Buy'. It easily found the new store and I just punched the address it gave me into the Acura navi. Ideal? Hardly.

mike03a3

I have an 07 TL-S and the Navi sucks.

EVERY single effing time I've tried to use it to find a store by name it has failed to locate the one I was looking for, even though they've all been there for years. Acura needs to license a decent database. I was looking for something at my local Verizon store. They didn't have what I wanted, but checked in the computer and told me a nearby store had it. So, I went outside and tried to find it (a Verizon Wireless). Lots of them, but not the one I was looking for. Had to call for directions. Yesterday I took my daughter to see "A night at the museum". We were at her new house, so looked online to find a convenient movie house. The Navi didn't even recognize the address. OK, maybe it's too new? We called and got directions, and when we neared the place the Navi basicall said we were off the map in unverified areas. I checked my Garmin when I got home and it had a detailed map of the area.

Last Saturday we were invited to a party at a friends house. We hadn't been there before, so I punched the address into the navi. The good news is it found the address. But the trip was surreal. About a quarter mile before a right turn, the navi told us to turn LEFT off the secondary road we were on. This took us into a suburban neighborhood. I turned, just to see what the Navi would do. Following the left off the route, it had us take two consequtive rights, which took us right back to the route we were on, after a nice tour of the neighborhood. It then had us turn left and continue. The problem is that the right turn we really need to make was on the stretch of the road the navi bypassed. It then took us out to a main road, where it directed a right. We went about a mile, then it turned us right on the the other end of the road it bypassed, then back almost to the orginal route where the destination was located. My wife was laughing at the idiot navi the whole time.

I am totally dismayed at the navi. It is a marvelous piece of technology that is completely ruined by the miserable quality of the database and some poor programming decisions.

If I had the time to rewrite the code for how it searchs and modify it to use the Garmin data DVDs, I could make a fortune selling an upgrade to this miserable POS.

JLondon

+1

DMZ

Though I've shared your same frustrations at times, there have however, been moments where the Navi HAS saved my ass and I'd still rather have it than not have it. Regardless, the programming is in grave need of work. Since the system knows where you are, there's NO EXCUSE for it not coming up with the closest Home Depot, McDonald's, etc. When it comes to punching in an address, why is it set up to enter the street name first rather than the # of the address? With the Nav system in the new Camry and the girlfriend's brother's 3 year old Lexus GX470, you enter the address in the order you'd think of it ( 5 elm st, NOT Elm St 5).......DUH.........

Acura could take some serious lessons from Toyota/Lexus here
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lindsaydyan

I feel the same way!!!! It's a shame.