Misdirected off motorway

RobG1

Driving up M5 from Bristol to Birmingham, I was directed TWICE to leave the motorway.
The first time I was instructed to leave and join the M50 towards Ross-on-Wye: I decided to ignore that.
Some time later I was directed to exit onto the Wolverhampton road, and because I knew there were long hold-ups ahead, I took the turning. When I reached the roundabout over the motorway I was instructed to take the second exit.
Guess where this took me; yes, down to the motorway I'd just left. Tell me what algorithm is responsible for that bit of stupidity. AND it takes 4 hours to download the maps!

BrianE

Something is fundamentally wrong with the route planning of these devices. The length of time they have been around they should be providing a 1st class service regarding their core function and yet the likes of Google outperform them by a large margin. No-one seems to be able to answer the question as to why this should be and I find that very frustrating.

RobG1

It is pathetic that something costing several hundred quid is outperformed by a freebie on a mobile phone (and you have to pay xtra for speedcam data).

PeterRussell53

I had one of the very early TomToms and it worked remarkably well, by and large. Now though I have a GO 5020 with WiFi and despite setting it up correctly it never actually offers me the final choice of 'fastest, most economical or most direct'. Sometimes it will just route me off a UK motorway or main road in order to cut a corner, despite the shortcut always taking longer as it is using narrow country lanes. I know from my rallying days that maintaining an average of even 30mph on what are classed 'yellows' on an Ordnance Survey map is very hard, so surely TomTom should be able to program road width and complexity into their navigational software in order to avoid that? Seldom is a 'yellow' (a narrow national speed limited road of 60mph) ever faster than an A or a B road at the national speed limit - everyone seems to know that EXCEPT TomTom!

Megalos

Hi Peter, the issue with country lanes in the UK is a known issue, for a long time already. You can find many topics on this forum abut this topic. Not sure though what the latest status is on improving this.