can satnav help you be a more economical driver?

[culzean]

I have had a Garmin Nuvi 1490T satnav (5" screen) for a couple of months now and its a great piece of kit. It has an ECO feature where you can enter the city and highway fuel consumption and fuel cost figures for your car, and for every journey after that it will give you the estimated cost of the journey.

But further to that it has a circled leaf motif on the screen, and it actually tracks your driving style and indicates with either a green, amber or red leaf how smooth and economical your driving is, and produces a graph to allow you to check later if you are improving your driving style.

For those interested it also has full bluetooth support for your phone, including voice dialing if your phone supports it, and when you select a POI with a phone number displayed on-screen you can dial the number simply by pressing green 'dial' button on left of Garmin screen.

A great, in depth review is available here-
http://www.gpsmagazine.com/2009/08/garmin_nuvi_1490t_review.php

You can get it for about £170 on internet - http://www.activegps.co.uk/garmin-nuvi-1490t.htm

I have no connection with this retailer but cannot praise their service highly enough.

[guest1262]

I found it at £154.84 without trying.

[JOCK55]

I am sure it can improve your driving style. I have found that my right foot is much lighter these days just by watching the Jazz trip computer and seeming the MPG dip dramatically when I try to race away from the traffic lights etc. These days it's a graceful glide! Glad also for your comments on the Garmin SATNAV as I am considering buying such a device and recommendations are always a good means of judging value for money. I like the review you posted also. Very informative. Thanks.
 

[Geoffers]

I used a Garmin iQue 3600 for years, until support was discontinued. Garmin are the best IMHO. I now have TomTom running on my iPhone. It's as good as Apple allow it to be.
The one BIG advantage with SatNav is that you are never lost. Even straying off route, or making a wrong turn and the SatNav leaps into action and still keeps directing you to your planned destination. That is a real petrol saver compared to the old days of driving around refusing to admit you're lost!

I take all the horror stories with a pinch of salt. Anyone who drives off a dock into the sea would have done the same with a paper map! Satnav is a tool, just like a paper map. Don't leave common sense behind.

[culzean]

I take all the horror stories with a pinch of salt. Anyone who drives off a dock into the sea would have done the same with a paper map! Satnav is a tool, just like a paper map. Don't leave common sense behind.

I agree, and although I have 2 satnavs I still keep 'paper' maps in the car, I find that these can help you plan your route better.  One of the reasons I bought the 1490T is that unlike many satnavs it allows you to input your own waypoints (or via points) to guide the satnav and you can ask it to go via certain towns, go through certain intersections or via any point of interest, favourite etc that is held in the satnavs database (they call these routes and you can save up to 10, and can change the order of the waypoints once you have entered them, then it will figure the best way to travel to them all). One of the things you can't do is ask it to avoid a specific named road, but if a road looks to narrow for my liking (or has grass in the middle like many in Shropshire) I just ignore the turn instruction and let the satnav figure a way round.

For me one of the best things a satnav can do is keep track of those pesky speed (sorry safety) cameras (try pocketgpsworld.com for camera databases for most satnavs, updated every 2 weeks for only £20 a year).  I do try to keep to speed limit but sometimes it changes so often (down to 30 on some 'A' roads even) that you can easily miss a change of limit.