TomTom Horrible Routing
I have a Via 1505 with updated maps. I recently went on a trip to Fla. where the GPS was more harm than good. It is set to Fastest and IQ enabled. It sent me thru Jacksonville on 95 instead of 295 ...
Forum Discussion
Bill.Satellite wrote:
I am a Garmin guy but when one of mine died I found a really good deal on a Tom Tom. I kept if for less than a week before I returned it and bought another Garmin. Found it to be a complete waste.
Ditto. My RV came with a TomTom in-dash unit. After trying for a couple of years to fall in love with it, I gave up and replaced the in-dash with a Garmin. One of my main complaints about TomTom is it couldn't navigate me to one National Park I frequent. Customer service told me it must be because the roads were new. Well yeah, 40+ years ago they were new and they've been replaced at least three times since then! Once there though, it knew where it was, where the roads were and it could plot a track home. Go figure.
I think the main differences in routing between TomTom and Garmin are how they select the destination point and how they deal with preferences and avoidances. I think I read someplace that one will determine destination by the closest city limit and the other routes to city center. For big cities that can be a huge difference in routing. The other difference I think is how the two prioritize the route segments and avoidances. TomTom seemed to apply preferences first and avoidances second whereas Garmin seems to apply avoidances first. So if I preferred Interstates and want to avoid toll roads, TomTom would route me thru Hell's Half Acre to keep me on Interstates, where Garmin would plot a more direct route that just avoided toll roads. Of course if I didn't program it to avoid unpaved roads I could end up on some farmer's cow path.
