Satnav shootout 9 countries - 4200km, how did MRA Navigation Compare?

[Michael Rhys]

I was never intending to write a review of different GPS/satnavs but on a recent trip (last week) of 9 countries (4200km 2600miles) using different satnavs proved eye opening. This is not a scientific review but my opinions.

A group of 8 riders set out from the UK travelling down to the Aegean Sea in Italy covering the Dolomites and the infamous Stelvio pass. The routes were planned ahead of time in Myroute-app. On the trip we had a mixture of satnavs : Tomtom Rider 550, BMW Navigator (Garmin), Connected ride app (BMW) and My route app navigation. Routes created in Myroute app had enough shaping points to make the routes the same (in theory). Here are my observations:

True to Route:

My Route app 9/10
Tomtom 7/10
Connected Ride 7/10
Garmin 2/10

It quickly became apparent that the best at following the route was MRA, there were a couple of times it tried to take short cuts rather than following the existing road but nowhere near as many as the TT. Connected ride was also pretty good at this respect.
Garmin was absolutely hopeless there were occasions where its route was 100km more than the other devices. If the GPS route deviated MRA became the source of truth.

Road Closures:

Tomtom 6/10
MRA 4/10
Connected Ride 3/10
Garmin 3/10

In Italy there were many road closures due to landslides. The moment Tomtom loaded the route it would show a no entry symbol on the road showing that a part of the route was closed.

MRA If the road closure was between shaping points then it would automatically route round it. If however it wasn't between shaping points the route led you to the road closure and then did a U-turn back again. Luckily TT was warning us of the road closures so were able to adjust the routes before it became and issue. Without the TT we would have had some pretty bad experiences in this regard. MRA needs to up its game here. The others were similar.

Rerouting when off route

When you reach a road block and have to turn off, MRA navigated you back to the planned route at the next convenient point. Same for Garmin. TT insisted on sending you back to the point you deviated the route which is no help when the road is closed.

Changing the route on the fly

MRA 10/10
Connected ride 9/10
TT 5/10
Garmin 0/10

When Tomtom identified a road closed it was a simple matter in the MRA to change the route, this became available immediately in MRA navigation. It could also be easily exported to the connected ride app. You could get it on to TT by Saving to mydrive then trying to get TT cloud to update it, it worked most of the time but was hit and miss.
Couldn't work out how to add it to Garmin on the fly.

Fuel Stations

TT 10/10
Garmin 5/10
MRA 2/10
Connected ride n/a

Tomtom has an amazing side bar showing the next few fuel stations along the route. You can decide whether you need to fill up at the next one or whether you have the range to get to the one after. This is just superb.
MRA shows them on the map but by then it is usually to late to make an informed decision.
Garmin allowed you to search for fuel stations nearby but not on the route.

Speed Cameras

TT 8/10
MRA 5/10
Garmin 5/10
Connected Ride 0/10

The tomtom highlighted approximately 40pct more speed cameras than MRA (higher in Germany - I know there are restrictions here in using detectors but it should be MY choice to use it or not).
I would like a more prominent alert in MRA not just a simple chime (make it customisable?)
Let me have a switch which says (don't show speed cameras in countries which do not allow it).

Traffic

All devices showed traffic but the TT status bar showed how far away it is and what the likely delay was. This was more informative but I can't really fault the others in this area.

Units

The tomtom automatically changed units from one country to the other (miles/km), MRA has this hidden away in the profile. Whilst navigating auto selection would be good. The profile works for route planning but not navigating.

Refresh Speed

MRA, Connected ride, TT had no issues with keeping up with the route. Garmin had a white screen often when it couldn't keep up with the route progress.

Other

MRA navigation can crash if not using the here maps.
MRA beta was calculating different routes to MRA production.
Be nice to increase the font size in certain areas.
Be nice if you could choose what POI to display on the map and have the colour icons a little bigger.

Summary

MRA was a real eye opener for straightforward routing, speed it is absolutely superb.
Garmin was totally useless, I have no idea why it would not follow a route, the forums suggest that this maybe down to not using basecamp. But basecamp is difficult to use and not universal. Those using Garmin have said they will be switching to MRA the moment they returned.
TT is the difficult one, its ability to spot road closures and show fuel stops along the road is far better than any of the others. Without the TomTom the trip would have been a nightmare. I would love to ditch tomtom in favour of MRA I much prefer it, however work needs to be done on fuel stations and identification of road closures. For now I will continue to run both MRA and TT, but please MRA address these issues, and you will have 8/8 riders on the next tour using MRA Navigation,

[Michael Rhys]

@Michael-Rhys A couple more issues. The vocalisation after you hame made a turning (continue for x km) is excellent, but inconsistent, would be better if it was after each turn, also its would sometimes say continue on this road for 10km, whilst the display says its 11km.

[richtea999]

@Michael-Rhys said in Satnav shootout 9 countries - 4200km, how did MRA Navigation Compare?:

That is an excellent summary, Michael. Good work!

This bit is exactly what we found in Europe too, particularly the road closures aspect:

TT is the difficult one, its ability to spot road closures and show fuel stops along the road is far better than any of the others. Without the TomTom the trip would have been a nightmare. I would love to ditch tomtom in favour of MRA I much prefer it, however work needs to be done on fuel stations and identification of road closures.

With better road closure information, we wouldn't have needed TomTom.

Our TomTom user has now migrated to running both TomTom and MRA which is a nice halfway step, but we still need him as a second opinion when things go wrong (and as a friend - it's not just your TomTom we want, honest).

[Arno 0]

Having up-to-date Here maps is probably an utopia. However, with a free TomTom MyDrive account you can check your in MRA created routes in TomTom very easily from behind your desk.

[Jack van Tilburg]

Nice review @Michael-Rhys
You mention four different Nav Devices in use by 8 riders. But how many of each type of nav were used? And how good was their knowledge of their own device?
You write:

Fuel Stations
TT 10/10
Garmin 5/10
MRA 2/10
Connected ride n/a

But with Connected I can indeed search for a Fuel Station and possibly add it to the route or start a new route.
Thanks to the "Wonderwheel" this could even be done while driving. But of course this is not recommended in all situations.

[Michael Rhys]

@Jack-van-Tilburg 2 Nav VI (one switched over to connected ride because of the problems they faced). 5 TTs 2 MRA (One using TT & MRA). TomTom users very clued up on their devices, MRA pretty clued up, Garmin's not experts. But all using a common route from MRA.

[Michael Rhys]

@Arno-0 When you plan your route from your desk the roads were not closed. Many of the roads were closed recently (after we set off) because of recent land slides. The TTs were connected to live traffic info via the phones. MRA had access to the same information, you could see if you zoomed in to the route that the MRA could see the road was closed but rather than report it it just showed a U-Turn. If it reported it then we could have changed the route on the fly. Why we were able to do because of the TT's awareness.

[Lynchy67]

@Michael-Rhys

Based on the Garmin results for "True to Route" I presume the routes were plotted by a donkey. (Are we nearly there yet!)
No offense intended.
The solution is obvious and simple, add more shaping points.

[Michael Rhys]

@Lynchy67 No the routes were properly constructed using MyRoute-app Gold, compared using the tooling for both here maps and TomTom. True to route was a simple matter of When one sat nav said turn left and another turn right. Stop look at the route and see which was actually following the planned route. In the majority of cases the Garmins were the ones in error. In general TT and MRA mostly agreed with each other, though the TT had more phantom turns. As for plotting of the routes a lot of time was put into preparing them and getting each of the maps to go the same way. It was only when they were on the actual devices were the deviations present. I am not one of the Garmin owners and had no axe to grind one way or the other. This is simply our experiences. Should you wish to examine one of the routes to ensure a donkey did not plan it, then happy to make it available.

[Michael Rhys]

@Jack-van-Tilburg I should add that the guy using the connected ride did not have his phone mounted just had the turn by turn directions on the TFT so I am guessing his view was restricted. The thing about TomTom is it has a status bar that just shows the fuel stations on your route, you don't need to go searching. I am assuming if you are desperate that on any of the sat nav you could just look for fuel stations near to where you are. The beauty of the TT is that you can see that on your current route that there will be a fuel stop in 2km and that there is another in 15km. So you can decide whether to fill up now or at the next. Is is a deal breaker - probably not, is it useful - most definitely.

[Jack van Tilburg]

@Michael-Rhys

TomTom users very clued up
Garmin's not experts (one switched over to connected ride (TomTom dus)

Don't you think this somewhat affected the outcome of this shootout?

[Lynchy67]

@Michael-Rhys

My post was a poor attempt at humor (Fail!).
But taking the Garmin XT in isolation, when you know the limitations of it you accept that it is notorious for making routing decisions for you.
The only way to overcome this is to add more Shaping Points.
My preferred route types are the twisty country lanes with the grass in the middle. I would therefore place a at least 1 shaping point on every road I planned to travel on.
Overkill! Yes, but it is the only way to stop the Garmin's from making decisions for you.
I no longer use the XT as its all about MyRoute-App now but I still apply the same process to ensure it doesn't make decisions for me.

[Michael Rhys]

@Lynchy67 No worries, Essentially your point and my review are the same. The conclusion is Apps are the way forward. What I wanted to highlight by the review is that MRA is not perfect yet, there are some features especially on TT that are better. Let's get those things into MRA and it will be unbeatable. The biggest issue by far is the road closures. Put the route into TT and it immediately shows you a no entry sign on the route where the road is closed. Granted you have to then fix it but better that than riding up the side of a mountain on several nasty hairpins to find you then need to turn round in the road. Having more shaping points has an upside and a downside. The upside is you are forcing the route to go where you want, the downside is the ability of the satnav to direct you round a closed road is restricted. I would love to see MRA come up with a message saying road closed (redirect?) select yes and then it will redirect skipping as few shaping points (but not via points) as possible.

[Michael Rhys]

@Jack-van-Tilburg Not for basic stuff. Plan a route, load it to the nav expect it to follow it. You should not need a degree in a specific manufacturer to achieve this. The behaviour of the other options shows you do not need to have that level of insight.

[Con Hennekens]

@Lynchy67 said in Satnav shootout 9 countries - 4200km, how did MRA Navigation Compare?:

The solution is obvious and simple, add more shaping points.

Or use the compare tool, it there for exactly that reason.

@Michael-Rhys said in Satnav shootout 9 countries - 4200km, how did MRA Navigation Compare?:

Fuel Stations
TT 10/10
Garmin 5/10
MRA 2/10
Connected ride n/a

I am quite sure after the next update MRA will rise to at least a 9 concerning fuel stations

[Lynchy67]

@Con-Hennekens

I’m not a fan of group rides, I prefer to ride alone or with “she who must be obeyed” as a pillion.

[Michael Rhys]

@Con-Hennekens The compare tool WAS used, so all the routes should have been the same, hence the post, and the section about True to route.

[Con Hennekens]

@Michael-Rhys, then there must be another reason than the brand of maps and devices for routes to be calculated so differently. Probably the calculation parameters (mainly avoid settings) were not set equal between the garmin device and the route planner. recipe for disaster MRA Navigation does that automatically, but on dedicated devices you have to tend to that yourself.

[Michael Wilkinson]

@Con-Hennekens Recently on a trip with some friends we undertook an exercise whereby each of us (3) went through every setting on our satnavs (BMW 5, BMW 6 and Garmin XT). As far as possible we made sure all settings were identical and then downloaded a pre planned route from MRA. Although each satnav appeared to be the same when comparing maps, after only a few kilometres there was a divergence and some were reporting a left turn whilst others were not and so on.
Not a scientific experiment I agree, but proof to me that there are dark forces which control the satnav world and humankind does not have control

[richtea999]

@Michael-Wilkinson [satnav company] sends you down a revised route, along with the next 100 vehicles. Magically the revised route fills with 5 minutes, and [satnav company] gets that feedback, and automatically re-routes the next 100 vehicles to avoid the jam they just created.

Dark humour at play rather than dark forces.

The good news should be that motorbikes are more immune to such jams, but unfortunately that isn't catered for by [satnav company]. We're just a 'vehicle', not a lithe and slinky motorbike that can slide through jams. I would be happy to share that vehicle info to get better routing - as I do with MRA (in a limited manner at the moment).