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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

How any company thinks it can continue to make money selling maps is beyond me.

I have just driven the length of West Africa from Morocco to South Africa[1] using Open Street Maps loaded onto a $50 Garmin GPS[2]. The accuracy and completeness of the maps is nothing short of staggering. The tiniest town in Burkina Faso, Gabon or the DRC has every single road, walking track and intersection, perfectly mapped. It's the same for all the countries.

On the entire 40,000 miles I can count on one hand the number of times the OSM map did not perfectly reflect the real world. It happened so infrequently it was always cause for celebration when it did.

[1]http://theroadchoseme.com

[2] http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/

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It's ~$800 per year for map updates for one of my cars, a Nissan Altima SV (and that's just an SD card that, of course, must be installed by a dealership). As you might guess, I've never paid for them. In the worst case, the girlfriend (who actually drives the car), just uses the Maps app on her iPhone when she needs it.

Contrast that with Harley-Davidson who is notorious for "nickel and diming" and charging outrageous amounts for otherwise regular products. I can just go to their website, download a file to a USB flash drive, plug the flash drive into my motorcycle, and it'll update everything -- including the GPS navigation system and maps.

It just seems backwards to me. I probably wouldn't pay anything for map updates for the car (and I don't for my truck, either), although I might if they were cheap enough. OTOH, I absolutely would pay for updates for the motorcycle but even H-D doesn't charge for 'em.

As long as navigation is available for free on everyone's mobile phones, I'm not sure how automobile companies expect to make much money from map updates.

It boggles my mind that Harley-Davidsons come equipped with USB ports, and require software updates. How do the grumpy old-timey bikers deal with the modern complexity in their bikes?

Heh, well, it's (mostly) optional. You can buy a new bike off the showroom floor and ride it for years without ever updating anything or, really, even using any of that new-fangled techno-electro-logical crap. :-)

Modern Harleys, however, have a lot of electronics available, if you want to take advantage of them. I've got a touch-screen unit that includes GPS (including turn-by-turn navigation), SiriusXM satellite radio, Bluetooth (for phone calls or playing the music on my iPhone through the bike's very well-equipped "Infotainment" system), a USB port (for updates and playing MP3s), a security system, a garage door opener, and so on. Other models might have CD players, CB radios, etc. The lower end/cheaper models typically don't have much more than a speedometer. Some of these are, easily, $50,000 bikes, though.

The software updates are dead simple, too. Download a file to a USB stick, plug it in, turn the ignition to accessory, and... wait. It shows the progress/status on the screen and takes maybe 10 minutes from start to finish. Someone like me (more "tech-y") usually gets the USB flash drive set up when an update comes out and then we all just pass it around when we get together for a ride or something. Others don't care and don't bother ever updating.

Even the "grumpy old-timey bikers" like their tunes. :-)

Same with my 2010 Prius. The navigation is fairly good (as far as car navigation goes) and it has a HUD with turn-by-turn directions, but the maps are stuck in 2010.

I’m not paying a few hundred euro per year to update them. Even if I did they probably wouldn’t be as good as Google or OSM, as currently the maps only have major roads and cities.

It would be cheaper and more effective to buy a replacement Android head unit.

OSM is probably better even in those areas. I recall my uncle did a bunch of mapping for OSM while 4x4ing around the place for the WHO's vaccination programmes.

This begins to fall apart in major cities without OSM volunteers ingesting city roadwork feeds. Of course, something like tomtom wouldn't represent that ideally either without a radio data or cell service...

Waze used to (still does? I don't know as I don't use Waze any more) display dots on paths and as you drove it scored you and also used the data to confirm maps. Is there anything like this in the OSM world?

Drivers in the field can record GPS tracks, and upload/share them through the OSM website. These can then be used either to directly create that road, or by remote mappers to help align satellite imagery, and then remote map visible roads in the area.

Not really. But OSM is a wiki. So there is no central body to "confirm" changes. If you want, you can just edit things as you go.

You can even edit OSM on your phone (e.g. with Vespucci), so you could drive along a road, think "this is totally wrong on OSM", pull over, get out your phone and correct it.

OSM volunteers are pretty crazy, though. A friend of mine spent his time doing linework for North Korean roads. It's a data sparse region for us capitalist pigs. Anywhere, there might be good data where you least expect expect it.

I paid for some map updates for my older model of TomTom a year or two ago - I considered using a free alternative but I was about to go on a road trip and wanted to be sure I had the right maps for my device plus thought paying might be some guarantee of quality.

The "new" maps were out of date - road alterations which had happened 2 years previously in my home town weren't on there yet. We found various other places on our trip where it seemed the road layout had changed since the maps came out, too.

Maybe I did something wrong somehow but it wasn't a very good advert for paying for maps. I've never used OSM on a drive but it's very good for walking in my local area as it has pretty much every footpath/cycle path (unlike Google Maps, which is very road-based), so I'll try it next time.

As for that older TomTom, I replaced it with a newer model because the battery life had gone right down and the touchscreen was failing, but the new model touchscreen is also very unresponsive, it already needed constant charging even when it was brand new, and the interface and directions aren't as clear as the decade-old model. I won't buy TomTom again.

> How any company thinks it can continue to make money selling maps is beyond me.

You do not sell to consumers, but B2B. There are 2 maps on the market you can actually license: TomTom and Here. If you want a map, that is where you have to go.

Small world. I've seen your site, probably on ExPo or something. Cool trip. Someday I will put my old Defender in a container and ship it somewhere fun. For now, it's just trips around the western U.S: https://expeditionportal.com/expedition-journal-the-owhyee-d...

How is navigation on these maps? Every time try using OSM to guide me from point A to point B, it becomes a feature-length endeavour. Has this changed?

OSM is just maps, there are plenty of routing tools available. I've used and been impressed by OSRM

http://map.project-osrm.org

I've had a decent experience with maps.me. Not a polished UX as Google or apple, but functional.

Technically OSM is a database of geographic objects. You can use that to make a map, or to power a routing engine (like OSRM).

Technically you can edit OSM yourself and correct routing errors like that. The problem is either in the data (which is easier to fix) or in the router code (which is harder to fix, but even filing a bug with an example is helpful).

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