[StealthBomber]

I am a 1st time BMW owner. 530d Touring.

Very nice car in nearly all regards.

But how on earth do BMW get away with their shocking navigation package? And what if anything can I do about it.

£2000 for the pro-navigation. That includes a few useful add ons including voice control which actually works fairly well. That's a £330 option, so let say the nav really cost me £1630.

The screen is big and useful - definately a cut above a Tom-Tom simply because of its size, but there the benefits stop.

The navigation "intelligence" is apalling as follows:-

Two sides of a triangle routing nearly everywhere I go.
Late announcements at regular junctions, highway exit announcements stated in miles, but calibrated in km (so "Exit 1 mile" means "exit 1km")
Sticks to long wiggly A roads where parallel straight B and C roads exist.
Traffic information impossible to safely interogate on the move, so useless.
Non-intuitive control
No journey time knowledge for specific roads (like Tom-Tom IQ routes)
Missing post code locations.
No GPS coordinate data entry
Very slow and clumsy manual location entry by map.
I could go on and on, there is so much that is wrong with it.

Apart from screen size, my £120 Tom-Tom was better in virtually every regard and on the last journey, we took that as well because the in car system could not even locate the end point and was advising taking us 10 miles north of where we wanted to go and working back south - bonkers.

BMW really need to scrap the system and licence from Tom-Tom and update as a free firmware upgrade with a Tom-Tom engine running the navigation.

If I had bough this as a seprate £100 unit I would have returned it, it is that useless IMO.

I guess hell will freeze over before BMW do anything like I suggest but it's really a royal rip off - I spent about £14,000 before discount on options to make this a "car to end all cars" and this is a real fly in the ointment. I have no regrets on any other options, even though many are really over-priced because at least they work, are well engineered and add luxury or true benefit to the car.

Anyone else feel the same?