GPS for autos starting to get ‘smarter’

Dan Carney • E-mail

Like Dustin Hoffman’s Rain Man, today’s GPS navigation systems are founts of detailed data that can sometimes be maddeningly challenging in the real world. Unlike that movie’s eponymous character, however, GPS navigation systems will soon get much smarter about applying their encyclopedic knowledge.

The problem is that while most of today’s navigation systems know where the roads are and what points of interest are nearby, they don’t know how to apply that information to the driver’s current situation, said Thilo Koslowski, automotive analyst for industry researcher Gartner, Inc. “The navigation systems are not intelligent enough today to make this information contextual. Ultimately navigation must become much more ‘situational aware.’ Today it is only ‘locational aware.’”

For example, inside the Washington, D.C. Beltway, Interstate 66 and the Dulles Access Road are restricted to cars carrying two or more people headed into the city in the morning, and to those headed back out to the Virginia suburbs in the afternoon. These roads are unrestricted at other times.

But car makers such as Jaguar, Land Rover and Mazda have programmed their built-in navigation systems to exclude these roads entirely from their maps because of there are some limits on using the roads.

That's because the manufacturers didn’t want to show drivers routes that they could be ticketed for using at the wrong time, said Koslowski, so they removed I-66 and other roads which have similar restrictions. None of the car makers could provide estimates of how many roads in the United States are similarly excluded from their maps.

The complete absence of major highways that drivers can not only see but may be driving on at the time they’re checking their navigation map causes customers to distrust their nav system, said Koslowski. “When you start to distrust the navigation system, it is not good,” and could turn buyers away, he said.

Navteq, the company that provides the map data to all three automakers, assures that it is well aware of the existence of those highways and that they are included in the map data it gives car companies.

“The information for travelling on the I-66 is correctly referenced in the Navteq map and is made available to our customers,” said Navteq spokesman Bob Richter. He added, “We regret we cannot comment on the actual system performance, as it is our policy not to speak on behalf of our customers who make other necessary decisions in the final system development once we deliver our data.”

Handheld GPS maker Garmin International spokeswoman Jessica Myers said that the company would never exclude entire roads from its maps, but that its systems do not warn drivers of carpool restrictions or automatically offer to reroute directions to avoid those roads during the affected hours.

Garmin does cull some data that is provided to it by Navteq and by its other data supplier, Tele Atlas (which is a subsidiary of TomTom), she said. Points of interest that are not readily accessible to people are removed from Garmin’s database, so the devices will not direct users to ATMs or fast food stores located, for example, at airports, behind their security checkpoints, Myers said.

Customers can choose to avoid routes that include dirt roads, one-way streets, toll roads and ferries, she said. These options, along with the emerging availability of real-time traffic information, are the beginnings of nav systems applying intelligence to their vast knowledge.

Nav systems should consider a wide variety of factors when suggesting routes, said Koslowski. If a driver is leaving home in the morning, the computer should recognize that they are commuting to work and that there is likely to be rush hour traffic. It could also consider, in the case of the absent carpool highways, the hours of carpool restrictions and the number of people in the car — which is already known by the car for its safety systems.

Smarter computers could also consider other factors, such as a trip that passes near a stadium on the day of a game, so that it could route the driver’s trip on a longer drive that avoids the congestion that will predictably occur on highways nearby.

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