BRZ Navigation accuracy and features
 

I've seen a lot of the car mags and review sites complain about the navigation system that comes standard in the BRZ. Most of the complaints seem to be focused on the interface and for a while, losing the GPS signal (which I understand has been fixed.) This aside, how good of a job does it do navigating between point A and point B, both on short and long trips? Do you trust it? How are the other features like POI, Bluetooth, etc?

I have had no problems with roughly 200 mile trips. That is the furthest I have driven in one sitting point A to B.

I've had no problems with it either. i've used it many times driving from the bay area to los angeles/san diego

It doesn't always use the fastest route in the city and POI are sometimes wrong.

I have had only one wrong address from where the GPS said to go, however a windows phone and a android gave the same information on their maps so I can't fault it for that.

I haven't had any problems loosing signals but the routing on it is sometimes nuts. If i compare it to Tomtom running on the phone the route on the tomtom makes so much more sense.

I used to have issues loosing signal every now and then but havn't had the issue since I took my car in for the TSB.

No problems here. I just can't stand her voice!!

I love the GPS unit. What I like even more is that I can speak the destination and it always gets it correct, even with the windows down driving 75+mph, tons of wind noise in cabin, and it hears me perfectly.

Wind noise and using voice to speak my desination on my iPhone 5 or Android phone does not pick up or grossly misinterprets what I say.

The gps always gets me to where I need to be.

POI steered me in the wrong direction again this morning.*sigh*

Same here. Hasn't given me any trouble, but I ended up changing the voice on the first day.

My GPS unit thinks my home address doesn't exist. My house is new and was completed in June 2012 so while it's pretty new I think that's long enough for it to be a known address.

I searched but didn't find anything. How do you change the voice??

The NAV voice direction is just way too loud for me.. even at a low volume. I always have the NAV volume turned all the way down. :D

As for the NAV accuracy, as long as you're aware that the maps are probably a 1 year or 2 old, it's pretty accurate. I've used it for address searches mainly.. I hardly use it to look up places by names though. I agree it doesn't always use the fastest route, and the hang-ups/freezes (the longest has been 4-5 seconds) can be really annoying especially if you're in a hurry to get somewhere or change a setting/route/destination.

Absolutely hate the navigation system. I'm constantly losing the signal, the address search is way too picky, and the routing is can be down right retarded. And I've used Honda, Acura, Lexus and BMW navigation systems extensively, so it's not a user error. :D

I've gotten some pretty silly routes from my nav. But I've never had the signal drop.

I think it's something like this:
Map -> Menu -> More... -> Setting -> Sound and Warnings -> Voice Language

I've got three English voice options, one male and two female. I think the default female voice is the only of the three to say street names, though. At least, the other female voice does not say them, but I prefer it that way.

It works great up here in Ontario, Canada. I'm not sure how to get the traffic thing to work though, do you have to sub to some service?

:thanks::thanks:

I'm not sure how it works in Canada but here in the US we get 3 months free of the XM Traffic Service. Unfortunately, for the vast majority of us, the dealership
was negligent in activating our 3 month trial.

My situation, pretty much. Before TSB, signal was intermittent and flaky. After, it's been rock solid.

Absolutely agree, and the address search is a great point. When you can type "ikea near seattle" on the crappiest of android phones and have navigation in seconds, yet you fight for minutes with the BRZ to entire a fully qualified address, I reminded at how good google maps is. And yes, I know phones have the luxury of making server calls, but still.

When it comes to navigation, it seems like 50% of the time it's amazing, and the other 50% of the time it just loses all sanity for absolutely no reason and doesn't recover... it either keeps search for a signal while it shows me as stationary, or it just drifts off and never corrects itself.

I once set it up for a trip from downtown Seattle to one of the ferry terminals in Vancouver BC (more than 156 miles). In Bellingham, after 90 miles on the I-5, it thought I was in the mountains, 30 miles east of where I actually was. After restarting the car, it recovered perfectly. So bi-polar! Too bad there's no "reset GPS state" button for when it does start drifting off.

Even if GPS experience worked 100% like the factory expected, the software and hardware are junk. No multi-touch, a full second lag between touching the screen and seeing an effect, and the convoluted menus show just how dated the whole experience is. Today's free android phones are better.

There's just so many bad UI choicest with that unit. When you get a call, there's a hangup button, and a pickup button. Naturally, they make these the size of your fingertip and leave the other 98% of the screen unused. Oh, and they place them *right next to each other* so that if you miss by 1/4 an inch, you're going to hit the wrong one. This means that when you get call, you've got to put your thumb and pinky finger on the left and bottom sides of the unit so that your hand stays level with the unit (just in case you hit a bump in the road), aim your index finger properly, and then tap. Don't forget about the 1 second delay, so you tap, finally focus back on the road, hear the phone ring again, go bonkers trying to set up your hand again to make a second tap, and then hear it pick up. And they say hands free is safer :P.

Radio selection is the same story. You have 8 or 9 stations, all stacked vertically. So if you miss your tap by 1/4 an inch (say you hit uneven road), you're selecting the wrong one. Why not set them up in a 3x3 grid so that the tap targets are less error prone?!?!

I even took my BRZ in for that recall and it didn't seem to change anything with respect to the GPS experience.

Your mileage may vary, but it's one of the few things in my BRZ that feels half-assed.

not a big fan of the NAV.... my Trusty Garmin is more accurate and faster... that and the time on the OEM unit drives me nuts.. if I put a place in both my Garmin and OEM.. the Garmin will calculate the trip with 5 mins of actual arrival.. the OEM unit will add 30 mins to the trip.. as the trip progresses... the time on the OEM unit will walk back and eventually with 10 miles of destination will show an approximate same time as the Garmin.. DRIVES ME BATTY...

Bill

The nav has not been wildly inaccurate for me but it is slow to respond to commands and the usability is terrible. It can really use a UI overhaul and is by no means a joy to deal with.

Nav sucks on BRZ. I didn't buy the car for the nav anyways.

I would lose gps signal mid-route but it was since fixed with a trip to the dealership and voicing out my concern.

Fixed under warranty and no more issues.

UI still sucks. I wish it had a little nook where phones can be propped up. I would rather use my phone's gps.

How do you do that??? Everytime I try to speak to the damn thing it always say, "please repeat".

The BRZ's GPS is bar far the worst GPS I've ever used, the user interface seems like they read the book on all the things not to do on a UI and did them, they apparently borrowed the processor out of a Casio wrist watch so it horribly slow, especially if you want to attempt to use the voice recognition, it has a hard time getting GPS lock at times and occasionally loses signal, POI sucks, the touch screen is very sensitive so I feel like I have to jab the screen so hard i'm gonna brake it sometimes for it to recognize the button press, honestly as a GPS system I have absolutely nothing good to say about it, I generally use my phone for GPS as it's vastly superior to the BRZ's GPS in every way. Ok, I take that back, there is one way it's superior, it has a "slightly" larger screen than my phone, but really, that's it.

I agree that the Navi could be better, even compared to my 2006 Lexus navi it's noticeably "cheaper" feeling, hard to believe it's meant to be "2013 technology". But after I spent a little time reading the manual and playing with it I can appreciate it a little more and it rarely steers me wrong. I did get the TSB done because it was always losing signal and doing crazy stuff before the fix.

One cool feature you may not know about is that you can program alert points on the map and it will give you audible or visual warnings as you approach. So if you know of a fixed red light or speed camera location you can program it and the system will warn you as you approach, etc. I also use it to set warnings for dangerous spots like hairpin turns on my favorite twisties...

How to set an alert point (on U.S. BRZ OEM Navi):
http://www.ft86club.com/forums/showthread.php?t=33450

I just want to shut the entire screen off! Drives me crazy cause it distracts me from seeing the road at night. POS system

What is the TSB?

start here >> http://www.ft86club.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21868

The Nav on the BRZ works fine for me after I got the TSB done (before that it would lose signal all the time), the interface is a bit slow and clumsy but it gets the job done.

Also I find the Nav useful to record a GPS track of twisty roads I find for export via the SD card to google maps as I documented here:
http://www.ft86club.com/forums/showp...&postcount=781

Didn't really expect the Nav to have that feature but am glad it does.

thanks, that was a great find, I just searched and found your earlier post a few days ago... actually I was kind of hoping for the reverse, do you know if it's possible to create a route on Google Maps or Google Earth and import it into the Navi? I was half remembering your earlier post and hoping that the system would be able to read KML files, but apparently not?

1) using the touchscreen is difficult, you have to hit everything twice before it accepts your input.

2) the user interface is ass backwards.Almost like it was literally translated to English from Japanese and hidden in awkward sub-menus that have no logical grouping.

3) the automated voice almost (figuratively) drove me to punching the screen one time when I was using it to find a local place.

4) the maps are outdated, several times already I missed my turns because the nav was routing me to exits or ramps that were no longer there. Dangerous and frustrating.

5) several other car companies NAVs are leaps and bounds better than this really out dated unit. Had it been an optional equipment I would have easily passed on this brick.

Other than that, I loooooooooove my BRZ, especially the HIDs at night.

Thanks, when I looked at the track files the HUNav creates, they look like normal GPX files, so we should be able to edit or create new ones using one of the many GPX edit utilities out there and then load it onto the SD card and have them visible on the Nav.

I haven't tried this yet but it's on my list to do sometime, it would be especially useful if way points are possible.

Very glad the HUNav uses such a generic format for those which opens up the options to export/import.

Anyone else have problems with the navigation system telling you over and over again that there is "heavy traffic ahead"? Mine was doing it all weekend in the MD/VA area and THERE WAS NO TRAFFIC. It was driving me crazy.

Mines doesn't do traffic at all.. :iono: maybe that's a good thing haha

I have not used it that much, it seems a bit rough but it gets the job done haha. I have not noticed any loss of signal. I will say the maps do need to be updated. There is a newer exit on the Highway by my house(open spring 2012) and the system thinks I'm driving in the river.

There are some settings for how it handles traffic you might want to check that, for me I only had traffic info during the trial SiriusXM period and once that ran out traffic went with it, I don't miss it.

I'm pretty sure that will be the case for me. XM expires at the end of this month. Haven't decided if I want to (pay to) keep it.