Car GPS units- whats good?

So I have been doing some research on these for a birthday gift and curious what everyone here recommends. I keep seeing garmin come up as one of the better ones but my friend says they are not impressed with theirs.

Post up what you use, if you like it (why you do/don’t), and if you don’t mind sharing the cost.

I’ve used a few and REALLY like the Garmins.

I have the 205w. Today, I’d buy a 265wt with the free traffic for life. Should be $200-250

Pros:
Accurate time estimate. I drive 5-8mph over on highways and this thing is dead nuts accurate for trip times
Clean, easy to read interface. A lot of the GPSs now are cluttered and annoying to read
Turns on-off with power on/off. I hardwire my shit and want it on when the car is on. Tomtoms don’t do this
Explorable map. You can move the map around to look at areas other than where you’re at

Garmin/thread

+1

Garmin has the best routing engine for north america and that’s the key piece in any turn by turn GPS.

I have a TOM TOM 130 and have been happy with it. It just doesn’t hold a charge as long as I would like but I always keep the screen lit up all the time.

I have a nuvi, it’s good

gf has a Magellan, it sucks balls

i REALLY like my garmin
it shows you the mph while you’re driving, it also tells u the area’s speed limit… i am a wierdo, and always stare at it right when i pass by a new change in speed limit, and it always changes dead on

my magellen does none of that, it takes forever for it to relocate the satellite, and it sucks. My says “turn left” when it is clearly telling you to go right. it just cant pronounce the word “right” for some reason

How ever the only thing i like about the magellen more than the garmin is for turn arounds. the magellen will just tell u to turn around, the garmin will make u take a 5mile rdetour just to turn around and head the other way

I think you can turn off u-turn avoidance to fix that with the garmin.

i have a garmin 205w nuvi its friggen awesome

fyi, the 205w is on sale for 159 on newegg

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16858108366

Garmin FTW,although some of the tomtoms are nice too.

I like Garmin because you can usually find maps for free OR you can purchase lifetime map updates at a reasonable price.

Garmin 205w.

I bought mine for $50 brand new at Best Buy a couple months ago on some amazing deal.

yet another vote for Garmin… don’t know why you’d get anything else. Esp. with how cheap they are these days.

Perhaps your friends are morons and don’t know what they are talking about?

I went with the Garmin 255WT (The guy at BB said the 255 replaced the 265? I would have grabbed the 265 if they had it). We will be using it on our trip to WVA. Ill bump with how it faired

FYI … ALL Kenwood Navi headunits Use the Garmin engine … just incase you wanted to swap out your radio

the jvc nx7000 , its awasome tv,gps 12 million points of intrest, bluetooth, and its detachable face.

thats AWASOME!

i have a garmin nuvi 255wt. i like it although i think i need to change the settings. last time i used it was to find the collision shop for town and it wanted me to take the main st exit off the 290 and follow rt 5 all the way to southwestern. i chose to ignore that and the arrival time dropped dramatically since i took the 219. it also gets counfused with house numbers at times as well. overall though i feel its better then other ones out there. worked great when i was in toronto and wanted to find toronto bmw(largest bmw dealership in north america i guess)

How is the traffic integration? What is it like?