Prius Nav system totally USELESS

If you are doing a manual entry, Change your search region to the state where your detination is, and it will find what you're looking for.
If using voice, you don't have to change the region. Makes no sense.

 

I just jumped in my Prius and pulled up the MAP screen, hit the talk switch and said "address, Arizona, Jerome".....and it instantly found it.
I also did "address, Arizona, Payson" and it found it too. I live in GA.
It's you man. Factory nav infuriates me every time I use it, stupid things like making a touch-screen selection, then having to follow up with hitting "select", "OK", "enter"....to make it happen. Stupid. the original selection should do it.

I've been one of the biggest haters of this nav system, but I must admit after 2 years it does get easier to deal with, voice activation has always worked flawlessly for me, but it still ain't no GARMIN.

 

I found that the map data out west was fairly poor. Utah, Arizona, and Wyoming were much worse than what we have in Michigan.

Tom

 

What was the problem with manual entry? Did you change the search region?

No way to change detail level, it maintains street level detail out to 700ft. range.

Garmin makes a Garmin interface for in-dash display applications. The trick is getting it to display, the options being the additional expense of a video input interface, or tap the back-up camera and then have to look at the back-up warning. Also, it's controlled by a handheld remote. The remote and it's use seem intuitive.
Expensive.
Just get the latest Garmin wide-screem with next generation lane-guidance. They are awesome.
Or learn to tolerate and use the factory NAV

 

So that's it! I guess we all need to work on our Georgia accents!

 

Well, I can't speak to the factory NAV, but I did get a $10 Gadgetron mount at Best Buy and have my iPhone 3G displaying google maps with the current location button turned on. I have an ac/dc power adapter in the glove box so the cable is neat and tidy. It gives me real time GPS locations and also does routing when you enter the start and end locations. About the only thing it doesn't do is give you turn-by-turn live street info and voice notification. But if you can live without that, you've got a gps nav system right there.

 

yea what he said (except for the garmin bit ... we have one, but the updates are a RIP, and the earlier propriatary memory sticks made updates impossible because they stopped supporting them)

 

I agree that the voice interface is pretty useless. Even with the windows rolled up and the A/C off, the road noise is usually enough to keep it from understanding me.

For the text entry, I had no problems with address in Jerome or Payson (v7.1). If those city names aren't coming up, you're probably not in Zone 3. It's also much easier to set the city name first before entering the street name.

 

I've found that the voice recognition works if I'm looking straight ahead. I sometimes catch myself unconsciously speaking toward the microphone in the roof, and I think the microphone gets "overdriven" and tends to distort the speech when you do that. It's frequently frustrating, but on the whole I like the factory nav system better than not having one at all. The after market ones tend to attract theives. Around here, they even look for suction cup marks on the windshield and then break into cars with the marks on the theory that the owner just hid whatever valuable toy was stuck to the window...

 

I agree the voice recognition for EVERYTHING in the Prius is only good for playing the "what wild interpretation will it give for this command?" game (the only two commands I ever use successfully are "suspend guidance" and "resume guidance"). But if you're mashing buttons on the console, it does a wonderful job (although admittedly you can only do that while stopped, that's a small price to pay).

 

You nailed it....the Voice thing rarely got the ideal response due to road noise.
Unless you parked your car and the ambient stays quiet, the Nav system usually 'turns off' something by your issued Voice Commands instead of executing the things you try to ask it to do.....I click on the screen often now instead for certainty.

 

I use it daily and finds it fine to use... and very accurate...

 

It's a mess, at least where I live. Yesterday I put in the address of a school, EXACTLY. It claimed there was no such address, and yes, I was in the right region. So I tried a different approach -- I drilled down to POI's until I found the school. It gave the same address as I was trying to input. So that was the way I had to set my destination. This happens frequently. I've hated this system for the year I've had it. My Garmin Nuvi is so much easier to use. Toyota should be ashamed.

 

Is there a way to get the screen 'stay' on the selection I chose other than the Energy usage or Navi screen? I have XM in the car and would like for the menu to remain on the 'audio' selection. Thanks...

 

Yes, in display you can turn off the auto return mode. It will then stay on what ever screen you are on until you choose to change screens.

 

Hello everyone,

I've been away a long time, but I'm still happy with my 2005 Prius, now with > 71K miles on it. But Martina (my navigation lady) has gone mad so I went searching through the forums to see if this is a known issue.

It used to be that she occasionally would give me a non-optimal route home, but it seems that more and more often, the directions she's been giving are completely crazy. For example, on a recent ski trip I used the "home" button to get me back to San Diego from Big Bear when the usual "front" road was closed due to an accident.

Once I found my way back onto I-15 (which is a straight shot back to San Diego), I kept the Nav system going so I'd have an ETA. But the estimated time and distance was way off, like over an hour too long. Eventually she wanted to me to get off the freeway and go on some secondary road. I ignored her, and when she recalculated the route, about 100 miles and about 90 minutes melted away from the ETA. This has happened many times now, with what seems to be increasing regularity. One of these days when I have some free time I'm tempted to follow her guidance just to see where the hell she's taking me.

I do not have any "areas to avoid" programmed in, there's nothing weird in the route preferences, the estimated speeds for freeway, secondary, and tertiary roads are all set to reasonable value (and have not changed in eons). I have no reasonable explanation for why the Nav system seems to be suddenly giving me a lot of unreasonable routes.

Has anyone encountered anything even remotely like this? There must be a way to do a hard reset / complete reboot of the Nav system.