Taking my first trip using the D3 - hoping for good results. Very disappointed. Here's the situation:

 

From my home area around Binghamton, NY I entered a destination address just outside of Cleveland OH. The route plotted (set on 'fastest' vs. 'shortest') a course north up I-81 to Syracuse, then west across I-90 to the Cleveland area. Not at all close to what I had anticipated, which was one of two possibilities - either South on I-81 to Hazelton PA then West on I-80, or West on Route 17 to join up with I-90 around Erie, PA then on to Cleveland.

 

Furthermore, the Nav system calculated a distance of 270 miles - no way that is accurate, as the preferred route calculated by MapQuest (across Route 17) is around 370 miles.

 

Any suggestions? I tried the 'shortest' setting and that plotted some crazy route through several hundreds of miles through central PA - certainly not the preferred route. Also tried the 'multiple routes' feature - it gave me the southern route across I-80 in PA, but none of the 6 calculated routes took the best route across Route 17 through southern NY. I suspect this is because Route 17 is not an interstate highway, do it must be given some sort of lower priority in the routing algorithm. Any other settings I can play with to get the route I am looking for?

 

-Jeff

When I first plot the route, the distance that it first reads is the distance "as a crow flys" along that red line. As it calculates, it adjusts for driving the actual roads. Could explain the 100 mile difference you got, did you give it a minute to adjust?

 

Another thing you may want to play around with is having it plot multiple routes instead of one. There is a button in the menu to do that and then you can choose which of the five or six you like best

The distance differences you mention are probably "as the crow flies" as was mentioned above. I'll pay closer attention when I plot a new route over a longer distance and see if that is the case. If the final number still is off after the route display is up, then maybe she took you the long way. Not being familiar with the highways you are reffering to, I can't comment on them, but as you'll see by my attempt to hijack your thread below, some of the routing decisions might be based on freeway vs highway vs roads and the fact that it treats them with slightly different priority because it will assume the travel speeds are different. But that wouldn't explain the different in "shorter route" mode.

 

I am actually having a similar "problems" if you can call it that, with my D3's navigation abilities. "The Lady in the Box" suggests I stick to certain freeways (big lines) rather than state highways(thinner red lines) which for all intents and purposes are essentially the same thing in Los Angeles. The problems I am running into are:

 

1) She refuses to stick to the route I've chosen (despite her giving me a different route) and will continually try to turn me around until I get far enough into the route where she suggests side streets to get to the other freeway (for those familiar with LA, I am referring to the 210 West of the 15, she'll try to take me down any of the N/S streets back to the 10fwy). This is a bigger problem for me as I tend to travel the same route to work and would like it to detour me only if there is traffic. (actually just tell me about it so I can adjust my route).

 

2) I can't seem to figure out the navtraffic detour and how it goes about figuring out a new route. She seems to get me off the freeway and try to get me around it, but I don't mind a huge detour if I can stick to higher speed roads. She managed to get me off the freeway in Watts (yes, SouthCentral LA) the other day as I wasn't paying attention. I was able to use the navtraffic tonight to my advantage, basically what I did was let her plot "her route" home and then I zoomed out on the map looking for traffic and accidents along the way. I managed to avoid one manually as it wasn't on her route, but the 2nd one she told me about and give me the option to go around it. Third one she warned me about, but I missed hitting the button, I got off the freeway and started heading in the direction of home (i was about 5 miles away) and she kept trying to take me back to the freeway which was almost at a stop due to construction traffic.

 

I've only had mine a week, so I guess there is a learning curve to these things, I do wish there was a way to manually plan a route and save it for later so I could use it to go back and forth to work. This would probably help the first poster in his long route setup. Overall I am really happy with the unit, there are just a few things that the manual doesn't cover at all or cover well enough to figure it out. Kinda hoping someone here has a few suggestions.

 

Again..sorry for hijacking your thread, but hopefully someone can take a stab at these questions and help us both.

I have experianced this SAME problem with this and other navigation systems. Here in Chicago for example. I can be at the lake front and it will tell me to drive 5 miles West, get on the freeway, drive 10 miles south and then drive 3 miles back east to get to my destination. When in actuality i could take Lakeshore drive all the way south and drive 1 mile west. If it wasn't for the five thouasand traffic lights, yeah the computer route would be faster; but it all has to do with shortest time vs shortest distance settings.

 

You have to play with the multiple routes settings or avoid freeways or toll roads settings. I haven't programmed the "Roads to Avoid" feature yet as I just got it installed last week, but hope it helps.