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Navigation in Honda Odyssey

Paul Westbrook | 17 October, 2004 21:41

This weekend was our first chance to have a long trip in the Odyssey. I though that the navigation system was great, and was really useful. There were a few bugs/limitations that I hope get resolved in a future release of the software:

  1. Normally when looking at the maps on the screen, we like having the top of the screen being straight ahead, instead of due north. While driving around the San Francisco Bay area, this is the default behavior. But we noticed that when driving around Palm Springs, the top of the map was always north. When driving back towards LA, suddenly the behavior changed, once we got past a certain point. It seems that some maps have information that lets them be rotated, and these seem to be in the major metropolitan areas. In other areas, the maps are stuck in a north-up orientation.
  2. The time to destination calculations do not take into account traffic. It seems that all the calulations are doing is distance to destination/speed limit. This does not take into account traffic delays. What I think that calculation should be is, for each remaining leg distance/(average speed on this leg, with the maximum of the speed limit)
  3. There doesn't seem to be a way to find closest "place" to this route. There is a function that lets you sort destinations by distance. It appears that it is sorting by "as the crow flys" distance. For example, if while driving you want to stop at McDonalds, you can tell the Navigation system to show all of the McDonalds, sorted by distance. Now pick one that is 1 mile away. Since you are are still driving, by the time that you make that selection that may not be the closest destination. As well, that one may be a lot further than the estimates. What feature I think should be present is, find the closest destination to this route, that I will arrive to soon. (So If I am moving, it assumes that It will take me 5 minutes to make my selection, so use that location as the starting point. If standing still, use the current location)
Update: We just noticed that pressing on the "north" indicator causes the display to switch between north orientation to direction orientation.  (Maybe I should have read the manual)

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