b1513

We rented through Hertz on previous occasions in Europe and Ireland and their Neverlost has, well, never lost us but, this time, Hertz is $100.00 more than Avis. I have no status with either. So, my question is, how accurate is Avis's GPS?

Bobette

biggestbopper

I imagine that all GPS are around the same in accuracy since they all use the same location system.

Why don't you just bring your own GPS with you?

I suspect you could buy a GPS with French maps for less than it would cost to rent one from Avis.

joemcool

Portable GPS units are running between $80-$150 online now. Assuming it doesn't come with the maps you need (it probably won't if purchased outside western Europe), you will need to buy a map pack ($50-$100, depending on where you buy, and if you buy a country or region). That being said, I got my wife a TomTom One for Christmas a few years back and we've been very happy with it.

One alternative that may be an option for you is to use a phone GPS. If you have a cell phone that will work in Europe, and it has a GPS system, it may be cheaper to swallow the roaming data charges than shell out for a new portable GPS unit. Phone systems usually use the most up to date maps available (ie, Google Maps data), and have GPS sensors that are equal to those in the portable units.

When traveling, I use the Google Maps app on my Droid and haven't had any problems (haven't tried it in Europe tho).

b1513

I have a top of the line Magellan but just didn't feel like carting it with me and it doesn't have the Europe map pack anyway. I guess I'm at the point that I just want ease. I like, at Hertz, how they program everything in for me and off we go. Avis is most likely the same. I do have an IPhone but not a good international plan.

The rental for cars at both Avis and Hertz are running around 800 CHF for a intermediate/ compact size car with an additional drover amd GPS. We're not going until April 26 and I'm wondering if they will come down in price. Probably doubtful since it's right after Easter.

stimpy

Yes, the Avis GPS's are accurate in France. And the rest of Europe. I used one recently where I rented in Lyon and drove to Italy and back. Worked perfectly. It was a Tom Tom.

I have my own Tom Tom which is a nicer model, but it was being used by someone else so I had to use Avis's.

sdsearch

I don't know about France, but next door in Spain, the Tom Tom I just had on a rental a week or so ago was out of date. Now, maybe not more than a couple years, but that was enough. I have a 2010 AA (UK) Spain Road Atlas that shows the A-40 from Cuenca westward to Tarancon having the last section before Tarancon still under construction. It's now completed, and doesn't look like it was just completed last week or anything. But the GPS had no clue that it could possibly be there, and kept tell me to turn right and turn left every time I went over an overpass (it though I was out in the middle of a field, despite that it should have able to tell that I was driving at highway speeds!). Also, it kept telling me to get onto a freeway at an onramp near MAD airport from a gas station where there is no on-ramp any more (it's been turned into a parking lot for a car dealer). And that wasn't the only place it told me to use an on or off ramp that doesn't exist any more, or told me not to go somewhere where there is now an on or off ramp.

IHMO at least at the MAD airport rental location Avis did not do a good job keeping their Tom Toms up to date.

When, upon rental return, I complained about this (plus the fact that it kept shutting off the screen all the time despite being set to never turn the screen off), they removed the GPS charge from my folio. But I would have preferred simply having a working and up to date GPS!

(I don't know whether the road system in France is in as big a state of flux as in Spain. but certainly Spain is not the only country building out highways left and right. I didn't rent a GPS there, but I was in Hungary last year, and again drove on freeways that a year-or-two-old road atlas either said were under construction or didn't even show yet.)

You may be ok with a couple-years-out-of-date GPS in some places, but it can get very confusing in other places.

But is there any way you can force Avis to update a GPS that they're giving you???

rcspeirs

No, you can't force Avis to update the maps. Because they don't control the maps.
The delay in updates happens at the software end (TomTom etc). All GPS units rely on a limited selection of vendors - this is where the delay is.

Slightly off topic. I was very amused last month to be driving a new Nissan (through Hertz) with an inbuilt satnav. The car was brand new - 7 miles on the clock - yet is thought I was driving off road as the road I was using (open six months ago) wasn't in the map database.

Another thought. Many Nokia phones has free satnav built in - and you can download the maps you need (virtually anywhere in the world) for free and use the system without roaming charges. It might be cheaper to buy a phone you don't want - just to get the free GPS.

edgewood49

Generally the only difference is the ease of using one from another. We just got back from Italy and France and used the NeverLost system in our hertz car which functioned fine. I will add that I also used my I Phone which worked just as well using the Motion X voice


Main thing keep your eyes on the road !

stimpy

Spain is pretty unique in the amount of road building they did over the last 10 years. My own personal Tom Tom which I keep up to date still gets lost in Spain. So it's not really Avis's fault. You always have to use your brain and not rely 100% on a GPS.

sdsearch

Well, that was easy on the freeway that the Tom Tom didn't think was open. I just kept driving straight and ignored the incessant demands to turn left or right!

But dealing with the Tom Tom telling me to get from a gas station in the middle of some industrial area onto to the freeway by using an exit that didn't exist any more, that was way trickier. What the normal procedure in a situation like that? I had to figure out which way to drive far enough so that it would give up on that way to get onto the freeway and pick another one. But figuring out that on my own in an area I was totally unfamiliar with, that was the challange.

One things that's annoying about the freeways in Madrid is that they don't tend to build overpasses or underpasses at many exits, or if they do, don't put entrance ramps on the other side. (And they have this issue in places in the countryside too!) So it's very tricky to figure out how to either "turn around" on a freeway, or just get back on, after exiting, and continue in the direction you were going. And when the GPS is confused about which off ramps and on ramps do and don't exist, it doesn't necessarily help that much! So I wasn't sure how to use my brain!

(Extra frustrating: Road atlases for European countries don't tend to have "metro" maps. They have the country map pages, and then they have downtown pages, but for example no pages covering the maze of freeways near the MAD airport. In a place where you have to know the exact lane to be in, because an exit splits two ways and then instanlty splits three ways again, a 1:300,000 map does no good, and that's where you a need a GPS, except if it's wrong, then what?!?)

stimpy

How did you survive before GPS's? Or are you very young and never had to learn that skill? There are signs in Spain. Lots of them. Yes there are some confusing roads. I recall when they built Terminal 4 at MAD even the taxi drivers took a long time to figure things out. But you can always turn around and go back if you make a mistake.

sdsearch

This is actually the first time I'd used a GPS in Europe. (The one time I'd used a GPS overseas before was the one time I rented a car in Japan, a couple years ago. In that case, the car came with a GPS built-in. I couldn't understand a word it said, but I could just look a screen every time it spoke and figure out what it was trying to tell me from the screen! Luckily, in Japan I rented in a small town and was just driving "rurally", in the Fuji Five Lakes area and such, and so never had to deal with big city traffic while using a GPS I had to keep looking at.)

I've driven in Spain once before, but it was renting (and staying) in Bilbao, not Madrid. (This was around 2005 give or take a year.) Even though some construction at the time closed one exit (getting between my Bilbao hotel and the freeway), and I did get lost a bit, I did not nearly have the problems in Bilboa that I would have had in Madrid; it's just a small enough city, and not as "ancient" as, say, Segovia, that I wasn't that hard to just use signs and/or intuition to get to/from my hotel to/from out of town (my desinations were once again all "rural", mostly the caves with 35000 year old paintings scattered around Northern Spain!), and otherwise use maps.

I've also driven in Hungary, western Ireland (renting at SNN) twice, "rural" (Stonehenge/Cotswolds) England (renting at LHR), and Norway (renting at Bergen once, Oslo the other time) mostly "rural" but did drive to my hotel inside Stavanger (that's the biggest city in Norway that I drove inside of, otherwise again it was mostly "rural"). All those without GPS, and I'm not sure that GPS would have helped enough in those particular situations to be worth the cost.

But having seen how mad the freeways (and exits on/off of them) around MAD (city and airport) are, I can't imagine doing that without a GPS before! I'm glad I waited to visit MAD until a GPS was available, and I'm glad I didn't balk at the cost in this case!

Once again, though, I was only driving from a MAD-airport-area hotel to outlying destinations. And I didn't find the GPS as useful in smaller towns as I might have wished. For example, I couldn't find any way for it to show me parking lots in the area and give me directions to one of them! I had to correlate between the GPS and a drawn map in Rick Steve's book on Spain to try to figure out where to park in Segovia, but I couldn't figure out how to get to the other side of the aqueduct from where I was with either, so I ended up giving up on the free parking that's supposedly near the bus station and just used the paid underground parking near the side of the aqueduct that the GPS took me to.

In most towns, I just used the GPS to get me to the town, and then I used signs along the road to get me to places I wanted to see (windmills, castles, etc). In the tiny towns most of those were in, parking was fairly obvious and not an issue. But most of these small towns I could have gotten to without a GPS, with just regular maps. (It was getting back to my hotel from all of these that I needed the GPS for! And not just for getting back to the hotel the last step, also in some cases "I don't where I am, which way from here to the MAD area?".)

By the way, I should explain that the Tom Tom GPS couldn't find my hotel. Apparently the street it was on didn't have a name at the time the map in the GPS was last updated. It took me over an hour to find the hotel the first time, and half an hour the second time (after my first attempt to "teach" the GPS where the hotel was failed). Finally I found that the GPS did know the name of the street one block from the hotel, so I stored that as the hotel location, and from that point on I was able to find my way back. And, btw, luckily someone had stored the Avis dropoff location as "unnamed road" in GPS, which I found by accident when my attempt to save the hote''s "unnamed road" over that didn't work, and so I just renamed that from "unnamed road" to "Avis at MAD" and then on the day of return it was easy!

Fortunately, I completed all the side trips from MAD that I could only do by car, and so I don't anticipate needing to drive while staying in the MAD area again. (Anything more I need to do in the MAD area on future trips I'll be able to do with public transport.)

(I should explain: All my overseas car rentals are / have always been on personal vacation trips.)

PUCCI GALORE

Fascinating. Whatever happened to map reading ? They give those
for free even now. I distrust all these devices as they always seem to
send you the furthest way and get muddled when you need them
most of all. Sorry but to me they are an unnecessary solution to a non
existant problem.

quickycollection

Hello,
I'm French, and I'm working in Avis Rent A Car in Rouen, France !
Our Gps are most of all with Europe maps, and all languages !
The prices are 11€ per day ! and it's possible to pay some one-way fee !
Have a nice day,
Aurelien

stimpy

Bienvenue Aurelien mais la question est au sujet de la précision des cartes.