When are car manufacturers going to stop robbing us?

[pgilc1]

With very very decent sat nav units now costing as little as £150 (even maybe £100 now) how can car manufacturers continue to charge up to £2000 for sat nav???

[Stu R]

beacause people are silly enough to pay extra for it.

[etaf]

and when you dont pay - but get one in the car anyway (I have a new Saab, which came with SatNav) I still have my Garmin 310D stuck tothe windows - cant do postcode address in saab

[blackburnbmw]

Stu R said:

beacause people are silly enough to pay extra for it.

Exactly!!!!!

[Steve Maund]

Not entirely true, my old A4, the satnav in that cost £2K, doing a deal on my new one, cost only £500 for the same unit, shows hows much money they do make and the cost is coming down.

[waremark]

I don't deny that handheld units have many advantages (I have a Garmin 660 for use in hire cars etc) but when I buy a car I pay what it costs to get:

Tidy and convenient integration into car's controls
A better looking dash
No incentive for thieves to break in, and no need to remove and hide the unit and ancillaries

and incidentally benefit from:

a bigger better screen
a secondary display in the dash
better audio, with muting of other sound
better retention of location when satellite signal is lost

I agree the price charged is outrageous - it currently runs at about £1,750 on executive cars. Even worse, I particularly resent the amount the car manufacturers charge for updating their software or mapping - often as much as the price of a decent handheld unit (my brother was just quoted £290 to update the software in his 2006 Range Rover to the current version). It almost encourages you to be a software pirate by copying a friend's DVD!

[Deva Link]

Buy a Yaris:
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/09/11/tomtom_toy...

[Frik]

They're not robbing you, it's how they make money.

They make a high profit on satnav and other extras because they make such a low percentage on the car in the first place.

It makes sense - if the base cars were priced more appropriately you'd never walk into the showroom.

[NorthernBoy]

Do anyone do decent ones in-car? The Audi system is quite neat, but it really should have a touchscreen input, full postcode facility, and better mapping. It is really behind the times.

Edited to say, speed camera database should be on there too. Great feature, which I miss. I end up having my MioMap on the seat next to me on long journeys, which is a bit pointless.

Edited by NorthernBoy on Sunday 25th November 23:18

[Funk]

If the one you buy fitted is better than what you can buy after-market then it would at least go some way to justifying the price. All the manufacturer systems I've seen aren't a patch on the TomTom interface for example.