The navigation system that came with my 2004 Infiniti performs better than almost any systems I have used. It is well integrated with the car, it starts in seconds, there are physical buttons for the most common operations, it always plans a route in a few seconds at most. The screen space is used well so I can see what I need with just a glance. The company that built it clearly thought through what they were building and built a product that is solid and scores very high on usability.
Integrated navigation systems can provide more value than what a phone can. The obvious point is that the screen can be bigger, but more valuable is integrated with the car audio to turn down music when giving directions. When driving in tunnels and there is no GPS because it can talk to the car it knows the speed and can provide better estimations. And having permanent buttons right on your dash that you can hit without taking your eyes off the road is something that no phone will have. These are the type of features that a integrated navigation system should absolutely nail.
The navigation in my 13 year old car might be a dinosaurs, but in the world of car software what matters more than age is usability.
Now on the flip side I have used various navigation systems that are almost the exact opposite and are always a pain to use. If that is all you have ever experienced it is entirely understandable that you might think that this years system is a dinosaur. Having recently car shopped I was saddened at the state of many of the systems I tried. They probably have 10X as much computing power, but they were slower and more difficult to use. I could easily see how someone who bought one of these thinking how next years model would be better simply because it would be faster from the faster computer when it is clear that it was lazy coding and a failure to prioritize usability.
That's exactly how I felt about our old Volvo. We bought it used and didn't even know it had nav until I accidentally hit the the buttons on the back of the steering wheel during our test drive. It was a disc based system, but pretty fast. The discs were 10 years old and some points of interest were out of date, but it was surprisingly good for being that old. If there was a missing waypoint or destination, we would just enter the street address in and be good to go.
The interface was what I loved though. The screen popped up out of the dash* which meant that it was super easy to see without looking down at the center console, and it didn't replace our radio or other screens with the nav, the screen was nav only.
The controls were cursor based (not pointer, but just menu selection) so the buttons were on the back of the steering wheel, so you didn't even have to take your hands off the wheel to run it. All it needed was a 4-way pad and an enter and back button. There was an IR wireless remote that the passenger could use.
One of my favorite features was that it easily supported multiple waypoints, search along route, and it stored routes even when you turned the car off. Taking a multi-day road trip? No problem!
* How the motorized screen still worked on a 10 year old volvo is probably a small miracle considering what didn't work on that car.
I have had the same experience with my car. Car manufacturers are far better at the car/dash experience than phones, however the phones have been catching up. Apps like Waze are hard to ignore. What would be ideal is a high quality integration between the two worlds, or at least the ability to use the phone's touchscreen as an extended mirroring display of one's phone if you choose as a universal standard.
I'd like to see a car have both Apple car and Android Auto. My point was more around the universal ability to extend either to your screen and not have to have to pick a particular car and particular phone to work together.
Integrated navigation systems can provide more value than what a phone can. The obvious point is that the screen can be bigger, but more valuable is integrated with the car audio to turn down music when giving directions. When driving in tunnels and there is no GPS because it can talk to the car it knows the speed and can provide better estimations. And having permanent buttons right on your dash that you can hit without taking your eyes off the road is something that no phone will have. These are the type of features that a integrated navigation system should absolutely nail.
The navigation in my 13 year old car might be a dinosaurs, but in the world of car software what matters more than age is usability.
Now on the flip side I have used various navigation systems that are almost the exact opposite and are always a pain to use. If that is all you have ever experienced it is entirely understandable that you might think that this years system is a dinosaur. Having recently car shopped I was saddened at the state of many of the systems I tried. They probably have 10X as much computing power, but they were slower and more difficult to use. I could easily see how someone who bought one of these thinking how next years model would be better simply because it would be faster from the faster computer when it is clear that it was lazy coding and a failure to prioritize usability.