Which GPS will take me to the exact address?

[Bob T]

Hello! I'm new to the forum, and I joined it to hopefully get answers to questions which seem pretty basic to me, but I can't get straight answers from the manufacturers.

First and most important, do Garmin or Magellan make any GPS units that will take me to the exact address? This may sound ridiculous, but the Garmins I used to have would not do this- instead they would guesstimate where the address was by the street range. For example if Main Street has houses numbering 1-100, it would assume number 50 was right in the middle of the street which means it was almost always off by several houses or even several blocks. I went through all this a few years ago when I finally settled on a TomTom. (The people at Magellan actually thought it was illegal for a GPS to guide you to the exact address, which is simply not true. The people at Garmin simply couldn't understand my question. Seriously.)

Garmin used to have some type of map system that would take you to the exact address, I forget the term but I think it was "smart maps" or "true maps" or something like that.

Every TomTom I've used will take me to the person's driveway over 90% of the time. You can't ask for better than that, but TomTom's interface is terrible and it takes forever to enter the destination because you have to enter the full name of the town every single time, there are absolutely no shortcuts. (Not to mention their customer support is abysmal now. They used to be awesome) So while I know TomTom will take me to the accurate location, I do not want another TomTom. I would rather try another brand.

I cannot find answers to this question on any of the companies websites. Many thanks to anyone who can accurately answer my question.

 

[Nuvi-Nebie]

The problems you are seeing is due to how you describe where you want to go, here are 4 ways I can think of :-

1. Enter zip code (post code in UK)
2. Enter street name and house number
3. Enter Longitude and Latitude coordinates
4. Select a point on the map

The first 2 rely on the quality of the map, post codes in the UK can vary from exactly correct to totally useless, some maps don't really have house number info. so they have to estimate as you describe above, so if you need greater accuracy you need option 3 above, all Garmin units I have seen allow all 4 options to be used, and if you enter the coordinates correctly, you will get the best accuracy that the GPS can provide

So where do you get the correct coordinates from?, you effectively do No. 4 above, either on the satnav itself or a computer program like Garmin Basecamp that has the same maps as the satnav, you zoom in to an area, select a point on the map and either make a note of the coordinates and manually enter them into the satnav or create a Waypoint (Favourite ), and download it to the unit

 

[Bob T]

OK you sound like you work for Garmin, because you completely misunderstood my question.

Let's say I deliver food for a living. I get 30 deliveries per day, at least 20 of those are new customers I've never been to before. I enter their address into the GPS and hope it will take me to the right house.

No one would EVER give me their exact latitude and longitude, because no one knows it. So method #3 is useless.

Method #4 is useless since I don't know where theie exat place on the map is- if I knew where their exact map location was, why would I be using the GPS to find them in the first place? Plus, if I were to tap and hold every spot on the screen along their street to try to find their house number, it would take over an hour just to find the right house. Doubly useless.

Which brings me back to your misunderstanding of my question. Suppose I did #4 and actually found their house number on the GPS map- well, that doesn't do me any good if the GPS has a lousy database of addresses, now does it?

I will explain my question again. I need GPS that has a mostly accurate database of the actuall addresses, not one that guesses where they are by making up a location based on the address range of the street, like my old Garmin did.

So I will explain it again.

Each TomTom I've tried has the actual locations in its database. When I enter 50 Main St, it takes me to the person's actual driveway. With my old Garmins, it wouldn't know where 50 Main St is because it lacked a database of actual addresses so it would guess, it would see that Main St has houses numbered 1-100, so for house number 50 out of 100 it would blindly take me to the halfway point of the street, resulting in almost total inaccuracy every time. This is useless for me.

I need a GPS that has the full database of the actual locations of each address. Which units will do this, other than TomTom? Are there any Garmins that do this?

 

[Nuvi-Nebie]

I didn't misunderstand your question, no GPS database not even Tomtom databases have the correct location of every house number in them if you think Tomtom can do this, then buy a Tomtom, the No. 4 method does not say point to the house number, it says point to a position on the map, how you arrive at that position is up to you, the point is if you have better info. than the database contains then use it, if you don't then hard luck

I realise that people you visit don't know their Latitude and Longitude and that if you have not visited them before you can't point to the exact place on a map, but if the databases are are not accurate enough you must feed in better info.from somewhere else or accept you are not going to be directed to exactly the correct location every time

 

[Bob T]

Now you're putting words in my mouth. In my original post I said TomTom gets me to the exact address 90% of the time, NOT every single time. 90% is fine. Even 75% would be fine.

What I am trying to find out is, does Garmin make a GPS with an actual database of addresses, or do all their GPS units estimate where the address is based on street ranges?

If it has an actual database of addresses, it will probably get me to the right place at least 80% of the time, which is fine. If it estimates the location based on some other algorhythm or whatever, it will hardly ever get me to the right place.

Garmin used to have this feature in some of their units, but I can't remember if it was called "smart maps" or "point-to-point" navigation or something similar to that. If I could remember the exact term I could search for it online.

Why don't I just use a TomTom? I thought I explained that clearly- because their interface is terrible, it takes too long to enter an address, and their tech support is abysmal. My old Garmin had a great interface, but it was sorely inaccurate- not because it had an inaccurate database, but because it had NO database at all for house numbers. It could get me to the right street, but almost never to the correct house.

 

[Bob T]

I honestly can't think of more ways to explain the same thing. But here I go again...

There apear to be two methods of determining the location of a house.

Method 1) The GPS contains a massive database of the loctions of every house, some of which are wrong but that's fine everyone's entitled to some errors. It has a distinct location for each house on the street and usually takes you right to the person's driveway.

Method 2) The GPS does not contain a database of the locations of every house. Instead, it estimates the location based on the address range of that particular street. So if the houses range from 1 to 100, it will assume number 50 is halfway down the street.

I am looking for a GPS (other than TomTom) that uses Method 1. Some Garmins used to use Method 1 and they had a catchy name for it, which I can't remember. But all the Garmins I had used Method 2 so even though I loved their interface, I couldn't deal with their inaccurcy.

I honestly cannot think of any way to explain this any clearer. I am totally exasperated at this point.

 

[Nuvi-Nebie]

Unlike yourself, I'm not keen on repeating myself, so I won't