One GPS With Built-In Luxury Car, Please

9. Finding The Eiffel Tower In A Saab 9-5 With Three Navigation Systems, Continued

As I mentioned, the Nüvi voice prompt indicated the names of the streets and roads in addition to directing me to turn left, right or to go straight. It is a common sense feature. All too often when a GPS device prompts you to turn left or right, you don't have time to discern whether the next turn is a driveway, an unmarked road or the street or road you want. With the Nüvi, however, you are able to look for street or road signs after the Nüvi's American-accented female voice tells you what street, road or exit you need to turn onto - incidentally, the American-accented voice pronounced the street names sans any French pronunciation, much to the horror of my French passengers.

After I reached the city limits of Paris, the Nüvi really began to shine. Tall buildings and other obstacles interfere with GPS satellite signals, although I was unable to determine the real cause of the performance disparity between the devices while driving in Paris en route to the Eiffel tower. I had made a detour through the Paris suburb of Vincennes to visit friends, when the voice prompt problems began. I am familiar with the streets of Vincennes and Paris, so I knew which voice indications to ignore and which to follow.

Almost immediately in Vincennes, I had three different voice prompts telling me to turn in three different directions. In the case of the Saab, I concede that I may not have inputted my destination address correctly. Regardless, I shut the Saab's voice prompt off when it directed me to turn and drive way in the opposite direction of the Eiffel Tower. The Navman ICN 550 often directed me to turn off onto a one-way street that was in the wrong direction or in couple of cases there was no street at all. However, the Navman's directions were reasonably accurate.

The Nüvi's voice prompt had me turn off onto the wrong street a couple of times, as well. Between Vincennes and the Eiffel Tower, the Nüvi failed twice. Once it directed me to turn off onto a dead end street - although it looked like the street had been recently resurfaced and an end-of-street barrier had been put in place. Clearly the data had not been entered into the database.

Mission accomplished.

The Nüvi also directed me to turn right once onto Avenue Montparnasse - when in fact I was already on the street and had to continue straight. A few minutes after the minor Avenue Montparnasse snafu, I arrived at the Champs de Mars in front of the Eiffel tower. I had relied on the Nüvi and to a lesser extent the ICN 550 to show me the way.