Apologies to James Brown, but that title to his song "Living in America" has been going through my head the last few weeks.

I bought a GPS car navigation system. I've wanted once since I first started using them on trips to California back in 2000. Back then I used the Hertz Never Lost units which are made by Magellan.

This new system is made by Tom Tom, it's a refurbished system. Which I bought at MicroCenter for $100. It was the price that finally pushed me to get this unit.

I wanted to get the TomTom Rider, which I could have used on the motorcycle as well, but I couldn't justify the price.

So here are my impressions after having used it for a couple of months now.

It does a pretty good job, mostly I'm impressed, but there are a few things that leave me a bit disappointed.

First the battery life is not what I would have expected. But perhaps that's because it's a refurbished unit and the battery has wasn't replaced. Essentially I have to keep it plugged in almost always. It will run for a few hours off the charger, but not as long as I would have expected.

Second, and more important the road database has a few notable errors in it. The biggest one of which is about a 1/10th of a mile from my home. Behind my house is a large park, a forever wild space, which probably will always be forever wild because it's the low point and has a stream running through it. The road at the end of my street, Pickett Rd. is broken by the park. The road approaches the park, ends and then about 100 yards further on, Picket starts again. The road is not continuous, and I'm sure it was left that way on purpose. To prevent local traffic from using it as a through road. The TomTom road database does not contain that break. As a result the unit has tried to route me though the park on a number of occasions. I am well aware of the problem at this point and so it's not a problem for me, but I was surprised that this gaff was there. I wonder how many others mistakes are in that DB.

Third, once you ask the unit to plan a route, it will slavishly attempt to route you back to the route, even when it should calculate a new route to get you to the location. This generally occurs when I've decided I want to travel one path and it wants me to travel on the original path. There's one stretch of road where it must have asked me to turn around about a half dozen times, when what it should have done was a complete re-calculate.

After a fair amount of thought, it's not clear how it weights different roads, but it's clear that there are some major issues with those weights. On the trip to work, there's a road through what is essentially an industrial park, that it practically refuses to route me on. Even though it's part of the shortest distance to the final destination. This is a prefectly reasonable road, thousands of cars use it daily I'm sure. Still the TomTom doesn't want to route me on it.

Finally, I've found my self at time startled by the voice as the unit tells me to make a turn. When traveling long distances, highway trips, where you don't get a lot of interaction from the unit, you can forget it's there. When the voice finally announces the next impending event, it's loud enough to almost seem like there's another person in the car with you. Which is a bit disconcerting. I've quickly gotten used to that and it was only really a "problem" in the first week or so.

Now that I've written about the things I don't like about it, I want to say that they are all mostly minor.
I really like having it in the car. I know it's not a replacement for my own sense of direction especially with regard to local traffic paths that I know well. My own knowledge of paths is good enough in the 30 or so miles around my house for the trips I make regularly that it's really unnecessary. However, there have been plenty of times, when I down in Woodbridge, or out past Leesburg, in places I don't know that well, where being able to "Navigate to Home", has been very handy.

Well worth the $100 I paid for it.