Why are navigation devices actually so bad?

“Why are car sat navs so incredibly crap?”, “Are car sat navs/GPS so bad everywhere?”, “Why does the sat nav lead you in the wrong direction?”: In German internet forums, many drivers curse their navigation devices. The general consensus is that anyone who relies on built-in sat navs will end up stuck in traffic jams and going astray.

The anger on the internet is also confirmed on the road: only 6 percent of German drivers use their navigation system continuously, according to a representative survey in 2021. 7 percent are even constantly offline and generally leave the navigation device switched off.

Why are sat navs so bad?

Navigation devices used to be high-tech

If you want to understand why we use Google Maps today instead of expensive built-in navigation systems, you have to know the history of the devices. In fact, modern satellite-based GPS systems have their origins in the military.

During World War II, researchers began developing a radio wave-based navigation system called Long Range Navigation (LORAN). This system was further refined in the 1950s and 1960s.

However, the development of navigation devices for the general public only began with the introduction of the Global Positioning System (GPS). The US Department of Defense launched the first fleet of satellites in 1978, which remains the basis for GPS today. Originally developed for military purposes, GPS was released for civilian use in the 1980s.

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However, it was not until the late 1990s and early 2000s that consumer-oriented GPS navigation devices became commercially available. A major breakthrough came in 2000, when the US military switched off the artificial degradation of the GPS signal (“Selective Availability”), thereby improving the accuracy of GPS by leaps and bounds.

One of the first manufacturers of GPS navigation systems was the Dutch company TomTom, which introduced its first portable all-in-one GPS device, the TomTom Go, in 2004. Other companies such as Garmin and Magellan followed. For almost a decade, they were constant companions of many drivers – until the triumph of the smartphone at the end of the 2000s.

Today, apps like Google Maps have eliminated the bulky GPS devices from cars. The detailed turn-by-turn navigation on our phones makes specialized GPS navigation devices largely unnecessary for everyday use.