Garmin going into standby mode?

there are a few reasons that your Nuvi will go into charging mode,

1) Some Nuvis (not all), will only charge and navigate at the same time using the Garmin supplied Power Supply Unit / cable* , so if you use a Non original Garmin 12V car / bike adapter to USB cable it will perform differently to the original, this is because the original PSU/cable has extra wires / resistors added which a replacement one won't have

2) All Nuvi (as far as I know), will only navigate and charge at the same time if the power supply can supply enough current, e.g. if you use a USB adapter that can only supply say 300mA, the unit will charge but not navigate, If you plug the same USB cable into a USB adapter that supplys say 2000mA (2A), then the unit will charge and navigate.

3) Some Nuvis (not all), automatically go into charge / computer mode if they see that the USB socket they are connected to has active data wire (as you would find if you plugged the Nuvi into a computer), using a different USB cable that only has power wires (and not data wires), will fix this problem.

If you are using the same cable / adapter that you used in your previous car (when you could navigate O.K.) then it must be that the new car is not supplying enough power, e.g. say only 300mA instead of 2000mA

* See post #9 below

 

O.K. I think you have narrowed down the possible problems above, If you are using the original cigarette lighter cable that came with the Sat Nav., then it isn't No1, above, the supplied cable won't have data wires in it so you can rule out No. 3 above as well, That leaves us with insufficient power, In the old days the socket you are using would be used for a cigarette lighter, they took about 10Amps, (more than enough for your SatNav), nowadays they don't call them cigarette lighter sockets, they just call them 'User Power' sockets or something like that, They probably don't supply 10Amps any more either, but I am surprised that you can't get enough power for you SatNav, as it really only needs about 1300mA or 1.3Amps

To answer your question, a different Nuvi will take much the same power, I would see if you can find any info. on how much power the 'User Power Socket' in your Kia is supposed to supply, it might be in the User manual

 

I don't have any figures, but as most of the power is used by charging + the display back light and all units have a similar CPU and GPS receiver etc, I can't see the power these unit take varying a great deal from make to make, I am surprised the car is not supplying enough power, it might be worth trying it again and maybe making sure the plug in the 'cigarette lighter' socket is making good contact by moving it around a bit, before plugging the other end into the Nuvi

 

One last point, although a non Garmin SatNav may take the same current as a Nuvi, I don't think they change mode like the Garmins do, so a TomTom for example might work, however it is risky, so I would try to borrow a unit to see if it works on your car before buying another unit

 

Garmin supplied Car / Bike cable sometimes contains a resistor 'R' to force the unit into different modes, e.g. either Charge + Navigation + charge mode or data transfer + charge mode, Note Data wires are not required for Navigation and sometimes their presence will force the unit into data + charge mode



I suspect that this Garmin USB cable utilises the 'Fifth' connector: -

https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/pn/010-11478-01#devices