It's sort of funny.. When I was doing my research before buying a BMW I came across a comment - and they may have been from here..

<paraphrase>
"Then again, maybe it's not that BMWs break any more often than other cars, but BMW owners seem to be far harder to please than other owners."

So I use the new hard drive-based NAV, and my experience with it so far has been very positive. My only complaints are some user interface nitpicks, but some of it too is that I don't know where everything is just yet. I even stumbled across some neat features while showing it to someone the other day, so I have more to learn.

But..

I have used it on several long trips and it has been flawless. These are routes I'm familiar with, yes, but it happened to pick - from the start - the perfect route, the one I would have chosen that isn't obvious, requiring many highway changes, etc. It might be coincidence, as that route is often the shortest "highway" path. OK, but still - it works great.

On local routes, it is rather stubborn to recognize "I don't want to go that way - stop telling me to take a U-turn and go the way you want me too."

The Lexus did this too, but it was somewhat less stubborn to recalculate the route. To the BMW's credit, the route it chose was fine, I just didn't feel like taking it. It will eventually - maybe a little further down the line than I would like - calculate a new route, one that's also correct.

Certainly, if it takes you more than a third out of your way, that's broken.

Given one of the same routes I speak of above, however, the Lexus wanted to take the route that was 90 miles longer on a ~500 mile trip. I don't know if it was the algorithm or the data, i.e. "road X is an Interstate and road Y is a four-lane Highway, but I really like Interstates.." Or maybe it thought "road Y is a cow path." I dunno.

Oh.. The feature I accidentally discovered is I can construct a route, bit by bit. I haven't had time to play with it, but I rather always wanted that feature. "Bread crumbs" would probably be better, but it's better than "take it or leave it." Stored trips are nice too.

Not to beat on the dead horse anymore, because I'm with you, but..

So far, the TeleAtlas data has only revealed to me a few flaws - very recent actual changes in roads I can forgive - but not at any better or worse rate than the NAVTEQ data on the Lexus.

Just saying. YMMV, of course. And it does. 67 miles at least.

:O