Is GPS Car Navigation Ready For Prime Time?
I wrote about “Aunt Minnie” and the public at large acceptance of GPS back near the beginning of May. Yesterday, a situation came up where I had to plan out a possible trip, so I decided to see just how easy it would be for a non-techie to insure s/he could find their way with a GPS.
I have a possible refinancing industry client whose needs would be served at the Internet Telephony / VOIP Conference in October, so it is best to get all the ducks in a row now.
So I go to Google and plug in “rental car in san diego with gps tracking” (without the quotation marks).
The first couple non-paid responses that pop up are from some kind of sleazy “link farm” with a .jp country code that want to send me to endless links about GPOS and rental cars that go nowhere.
The third result is an announcement of a 4 year old training conference that took place in San Diego, the gist of which was that rental car companies were going to, maybe. Offer GPS navigation systems someday.
Fourth down was a non-paid link from Southwest Airlines that when followed offered me a free GPS navigator if a rented a car at Midway Airport, Nice deal on getting the navigator free (they normally rape you for $9.95 a day … these things pay for themselves several times a year). But KMDW is a heck of a long way from KSAN (Southwest doesn’t need to bribe folks to fly into San Diego … trying to bribe ‘victims’ to fly into Midway though is another thing). Fifth down was a several-year old article from Popular Mechanics about (what else), “Who’s spying on you?” Not much help in renting a car at San Diego, with or without GPS … I don’t know about “Aunt Minnie” using GPS but I can see she’s going to have a heck of a job finding anything useful about it in Google, that’s for sure.
So I search again, this time without the word “tracking”, quit looking at the free ads and perused the paid results. First up, Hertz. They won’t quote a price on the most economical car with their “Never Lost” system, but they will promise one on the next tier up …for a total cost of about $80 extra. The next paid result is an ad from Pioneer trying to sell me an in car navigation system, not rent me a car with one. I then try the paid ads on the side bar. Alamo comes up first and they will rent me an economy car with a $9.99 per day unspecified brand GPS system … after 3 more screens and clicks than if I just clicked on the first deal I saw.
Cobclusion: “Aunt Minnie” can rent a GPS equipped car, but she really has to want to. Certainly not what I would call a prime-time offering yet. If I do make the San Diego trip, I’ll certainly keep you posted.