Spain East Coast A5 is NOT complete

[Lemain]

I have the Go 700 and before I started downloading new maps all was fine....maps were pretty accurate in Spain. For years now I have been suffering from TomTom maps that show roads that are little more than surveyors' lines on the ground....years and years from completion. So a journey from Almeria to Gibraltar using TomTom assumes a complete motorway which is not the case for hundreds of kilometres. The entire system goes crazy demanding a 'turn left', 'turn right' down a non-existent road but more concerning is that since Tom Tom does not know that the road is years from completion, it gives a false 'fastest journey time'.

I've reported this to Tom Tom time and time again -- surely I cannot be the only one to be affected by this?? Quite often it is the same in the UK, as well.

I have finally come across this forum and hope to find a solution -- I have pretty much decided that when the present GPS navigator dies I will buy anything OTHER than a Tom Tom.

This isn't a 'niggle' -- it makes the product unfit for purpose.

 

[dhn]

If you have the current (855) map of Spain on your unit and it is still fraught with misinformation, then I'm afraid your only resolution may be to go to a different brand (Garmin?) that does cover the area you need with more accuracy.

Do make sure you test the map out before purchase though.

 

[canderson]

I'm guessing that the OP is seeing something that occurs everywhere, only his situation is worse than most.

TeleAtlas clearly doesn't do field verification of everything they "know". Neither does Navteq, for that matter. What happens is that they receive input from governmental agencies that project roads for new subdivisions, highways, etc. with estimated completion dates that don't always happen. TeleAtlas still shows roads here in Colorado for subdivisions that stalled out for lack of funds. Spain, with their current budgetary issues, no doubt has even worse delays in the completion of highway projects than many other EU countries.

One can argue that it's good that these mapping services try to be pro-active with their acquisition of fresh mapping information, using the best available (non-field-checked, however) info at the time of a map release based upon what SHOULD be built, but without field checking, that kind of data is bound to go awry. Road (and other) government organized projects aren't known for being completed on schedule to begin with, and in today's economies, it's probably less likely than ever that they will be.

Unless Navteq has actually done the ground-pounding necessary to field verify the roads in your area of interest, you're going to continue to have issues. Teleatlas (e.g., TomTom) and Navteq (e.g., Garmin) are the two biggies in the business.

 

[Lemain]

Yes, I have the latest map -- I subscribe automatically and get an email when a new map is available. Of course the problem is that the machine calculates the wrong 'best' route. If it 'believes' there is a motorway between point A and point B it will direct you along the non-existent road. So you get taken off the incomplete road and trundle along countless small roads and through towns when instead you could have taken an alternative route and avoided the lot.

In my case, I drive regularly in Spain, France, Italy and the UK. Tom Tom is terrible is Spain, somewhat unreliable in the UK but fairly good in France and Italy.

I don't see any acceptable excuse for this nonsense. I've bought maps since learning to drive in the early 1970s and I don't remember ever having a map that shows an incomplete road as a completed road. One accepts that cartography necessarily lags behind the road building programme but one does NOT expect the cartography to anticipate roads that have often not even begun construction and are years if not decades away from completion. One benefit of a printed map is that projected roads can be marked dotted or in a different colour which you cannot do on an electronic map but on the other hand, you update the electronic maps many times per year.

As for TeleAtlas verifying the roads actually in existence, it is truly appalling that a major mapping company should publish such utter rubbish and charge for it. It is nothing short of utter incompetence to show a major six lane motorway as 'complete' when vast sections of it are little more than concrete pillars reaching a few hundred metres into the sky. Literally years from completion. There are thousands of other fairly trivial errors that one can live with -- though in urban areas, wrong one-way streets and blocked rat-runs can leave you in a no-go situation.

My own view is that the folk at Tom Tom who design and build this kit should read the riot act to the guys who do the cartography. There is no shortage of information from the ground for major routes -- heavy loads have to have very accurate road information, for a start, and there is Google Earth and other satellite information available.

The hardware is not bad -- mine, the 700 is a 2005 version and there are some issues and utterly daft things like having to copy and paste favourites every time you change a map but on the whole the kit is pretty good. It is badly let down by Tele Atlas whose cartography is hopelessly inadequate. If you'd asked me as an undergraduate electronics engineer back in the early 1970s what the problems would be in producing a navigator such as a Tom Tom I would have put 'location' at the top of the list of difficulty and accurate cartography at the bottom (yes, we had accurate road maps then). Isn't it ironic that we now know our spatial position to within a metre or two but the maps are wrong