Arborbridge wrote:Howard wrote:Without the accurate prediction of delays ahead I would have been trapped and delayed on many journeys.
This sort of technology is vital for VW to perfect as well as the more sophisticated controls mentioned by dspp. Mrs H's Golf SatNav has a more primitive predictive facility but it isn't very good.
regards
Howard
It's an interesting question whether one can accurately "predict" delays ahead. I use the usual navigator on Android which is useful in this respect but how detailed can anything like that be, whatever system is being used? Perhaps not as difficult as forecasting the stockmarket, but traffic does morph as time goes one.
Well and good occasionally following alternative suggested routes (clearly good for humungous motorway jams) , but quite often alternative routes get re-routed as everyone else is doing the same, and I sometimes wonder on a long journey whether one would have been better just staying put in the original traffic jam. Of course, one can never know for sure - just as one cannot be sure that chopping and changing investments does any good.
Whether in built car nav systems are any better in this respect, I don't know, but that depends on the amount of data collected and I guess Google has as much as anyone else to play with. I'm happy enough with "Rita" - (Rita the router) on my Android phone for my sort of usage and can't imagine a built in system would be anything other than something else to go wrong and cost the earth to change.
Arb.
The problem with a discussion like this is that most of the contributors are giving opinions on technology without any real-life experience of driving the cars and using the technology.
I’m lucky enough to have driven lots of cars and chose a BMW because, to me, as a driver (rather than an investor), it had a lot of advantages which suited my kind of driving. One of them is being able to sit in my study, planning a drive to a destination I haven’t visited before and sending a message to the car for an OTA update to the SatNav which works seamlessly as I start my journey the next day. To me this is worth a lot. It saves the dangerous fiddling with a touchscreen whilst driving at the start of a journey.
The day before yesterday I had to come back from near Moreton in Marsh past Oxford and, on setting off, the car warned me that there was a queue on the Southbound A34 which might take up to an hour to get through. It was nice to join the A34 at the bottom of the queue without running into any traffic.
The BMW infotainment system is a joy to use and does not distract one from the road ahead.
I have an acquaintance with a Tesla who has admitted that, whilst the car is said to be technologically advanced, he finds it less pleasant to drive than his previous Merc. Ironically we UK tax-payers have subsidised his Tesla and its running costs so much that it is a no-brainer for him, as a very wealthy chairman of his company, to gratefully accept our bounty and drive a less attractive car.
And getting back to VW, their SatNav, control on Mrs H’s 2018 Golf is light years behind the BMW system. Like the Tesla, one has to “dab” a touchscreen and on my local roads it’s hit and miss whilst driving on a typical road surface.
Possibly VW will be launching a brilliant, affordable, BEV in the next month or two. The ID3 looks like a car which may reinforce VW’s leadership in the mid price car sector. We’ll soon see! And maybe it will enhance their share price? Or not.
regards
Howard
