TomTom satnav now offering live traffic updates

Posted by James Marriott on March 16, 2010 under Morotoring, Traffic | Be the First to Comment

Now that you can download satellite navigation (sat nav) applications to phones such as the T-Mobile G2 (aka HTC Hero), the makers of in-car satnav products need to come up with something new and better to ensure that we keep forking out the £100′s on their products.

By a huge margin, TomTom are probably the best known manufacturer of in-car sat nav systems and although other big name brands include Garmin, it’s TomTom that are leading the way in innovation.

A few quick statistics for you: During a typical morning rush hour on roads in the UK you can expect to find nearly 2,000 miles of traffic jams with over a 1,200 reported traffic “incidents”, 900 of which happen on major roads. For those that are part of the ever increasing traffic, crawling its way along our congested, pot-holed roads, this probably comes as no real suprise but fear not, help is at hand.

If you have recently purchased a new TomTom unit you may already be aware of a bit of technology that TomTom call “HD Traffic” but for those that have never heard of it, let me tell you now that it’s impressive. The idea of the HD Traffic system is that it sends a users journey times back to TomTom headquarters where the information is quickly analysed. The information is then instantly fed back into the system as part of the sat nav’s Live subscription service which provides real-time (live) traffic updates to other users. Furthermore, armed with this information, your TomTom can then re-route you if a faster alternative route is available.

So now, where-as before all you could do was tune into the radio in the hope that a traffic report is going to offer some glimmer of hope, albeit too late, you now have an all-in-one sat nav system that can provide “on-the-fly” traffic updates with the ability to re-route your journey to avoid the traffic jam(s) up ahead. All you then need to worry about is why the route around the traffic involves going the wrong way up a newly created one-way system and whether or not the apparent fields involved are still swamp like.

Of course, all this still isn’t going to help you if you breakdown whilst sat in traffic, but the same GPS technology is now being used by motoring organisations to more effectively locate stranded customers (it’s not just taxi drivers that have fastened TomToms to their windscreen). Taking that one step further, companies such as startrescue.co.uk have recently released an iPhone application that with just a few clicks will contact the roadside breakdown company including exact location of the vehicle.

Of course, after all that, we all know that I won’t be purchasing either a TomTom or an iPhone any time soon…