NHTSA Suggestion Would Cripple In-Car GPS Displays

bricko writes "The recently issued National Highway Transportation Safety Agency guidelines for automakers to minimize distraction for in-vehicle electronics included a proposal to freeze maps on navigation systems. No more scrolling maps...just static pictures. 'Every current installed navigation system uses the car as a fixed point, and shows the map moving around it. NHTSA wants that changed so as to keep the map fixed. Even showing the position of the car moving on the map could be considered a dynamic image. The recommendation seems to suggest that the position of the car could only be updated every couple of seconds. Likewise, the map could be refreshed once the car has left the currently displayed area. This recommendation would essentially make navigation unusable. The system could still give an auditory warning for the next turn, but without being able to glance down at the map and see how close the next street is would likely lead to a lot of missed turns and resultant frustration.'"

Comments

Re:This Is A Bad Idea

[jc42]

... our stand-alone GPS has the option to either orient the map in direction of travel or orient the map towards North. The latter is bloody confusing and not preferred.

That seems to vary from person to person. I have a GPS gadget that also has that option. I tried the "up is forward" scheme for a while, and found it confusing, so I switched back to "up is north", which I personally find much easier to understand. This is probably related to my wife's observation that I almost always seem to know which direction I'm going, and she doesn't understand how I do that. I don't either, but at least I don't try to impose my preferred method on others who don't have an innate sense of direction.

There are a number of other such sensual differences among people. Among musicians, for example, some people hear the absolute pitch of notes ("perfect pitch"), while others don't, but hear musical intervals well ("relative pitch"). There's a long-running debate over which is better. Perfect pitch means you can pick up your instrument and join in without needing to ask (or experiment to determine) the key. But people like that tend to be really confused if someone plays something in a "wrong" key; the relative-pitch people don't hear anything unusual about this, and often routinely play things in whatever key is best for the others. This can come in really handy if you're backing up singers.

The best conclusion is that there are advantages and disadvantages to either approach, and you should learn to take advantage of whichever works for you. I'd consider a GPS that only does "up is forward" to be a crappy, annoying product, and I wouldn't buy it. And in general, I'd want one that implements both schemes, for situations where I'd like someone else to use it (e.g. as the navigator while I drive).

Actually, the idea of a passenger doing the navigating is one of the best ways of shooting down all the schemes such as this one. A good GPS system is one that the navigator can easily jigger to match their preferred way of doing things (including things like changing font size for different visual acuities), and then change them again quickly when someone else takes over the navigation task. We should be pushing for GPS gadgets that are good at this, with many modes of operation that are easy to change, and not for limitations that decrease their usefulness.

(I recently was driving with a passenger from China who wasn't very good at English. I quickly changed my Garmin Nüvi to speak Mandarin, handed it to him, and the trip went well. I left it that way for a few days afterward, to get more familiar with Mandarin direction words, but this really annoyed my wife when she used the car for something. So she got even by setting it to speak Arabic. Then I changed it to Dutch, just for fun. But not all of its settings are so easy to find and change. ;-)