Dec 07/Jan/08

From units with vehicle-specific mapping to those with integrated television, the satellite navigation market continues to evolve at an astonishing rate. Robin Meczes offers an invaluable update on just what's happening in this extraordinarily fast-moving market

Few technologies have evolved as quickly as satellite navigation, and few have enjoyed such widespread take-up in so short a time. Figures published recently by ABI Research suggest that over 29 million portable navigation devices will have been shipped worldwide during 2007, and it anticipates that this figure will rise to more than 100 million units by 2011.

One reason, of course, is that satnav devices are getting cheaper. A quick trawl across just a few retail Web sites shows that the cheapest devices start at under £80, and there are a host of different units to choose from for anyone prepared to spend up to £150 - a sum that wouldn't buy you any kind of satnav device at all just a couple of years or so ago.

Satnav systems are also becoming ever more capable. Features available only on the most desirable units 12 or 24 months ago are now far more common, and many of the more sophisticated devices now incorporate or integrate with other, non-satnav-related features and functions.

 

Take Siemens VDO's latest PN6000 and PN4000 by way of example. Available from this month (December), the units include street-level European mapping, safety camera alerts and either a widescreen 5.6 in (PN6000) or pocket-sized 4.3 in (PN4000) screen with an integrated digital TV receiver and two antennas to deliver the Freeview digital TV service - and all that in a package that costs either just under £280 or just under £350, depending on screen. The new units also play WMV video and MP3 music files, display JPEG pictures, and come with a choice of games and an optional cradle that offers Bluetooth connectivity for hands-free calling, and can be hard-wired into your vehicle if desired.

Such devices simply reflect the growing trend towards hardware convergence that is so visible with other products such as mobile phones. In the words of Siemens VDO product manager Ian Crofts: 'If you think of the average modern home, there are more and more units acting as central control systems for a wide variety of functions - and we see the vehicle as an extension of that.' He adds: 'Once you look at things that way, the idea of a separate portable navigation device or TV starts to disappear.'

Moreover, increasingly, satnav devices are being integrated with - or in some cases actually replacing - traditional fleet management systems, effectively becoming the hub around which applications such as vehicle tracking, job scheduling and driver-to-base communications revolve.

Jeremy Goulds, UK manager for TomTom Work, says the take-up has been 'phenomenal' since this system was launched in May 2006. It is aimed specifically at fleets, offering a combined navigation, vehicle tracking and communications solution. Part of the reason for this success, he believes, is that drivers who have already used a TomTom satellite navigation device view the extended system much more positively than they would a standard GPS-based system.

'Drivers know a TomTom device helps them do their job, and it's technology many of them are now familiar with, so the move to, say, job allocation on top of that is very small, and drivers tend to be enthusiastic about it, rather than rejecting it,' he says.

Typically, TomTom Work will use standard GPS vehicle tracking, with a SIM card in the navigation device handling the communications; but there's also an option to have just a TomTom device with a built-in SIM, effectively eliminating any need for a vehicle-mounted black box, while still providing vehicle tracking, navigation and communications.

Garmin, too, has begun to combine straightforward satnav with GPS vehicle tracking, working in conjunction with various partners. European product director Clive Taylor says such applications are 'a very exciting development over and above standard satellite navigation', and points to two recent UK examples - one a contract road maintenance operation involved in gritting activities, one a waste collection operation run by a local council - both involving hundreds of vehicles.

'Traditional' satnav features, meanwhile, such as the provision of traffic information, are also getting more sophisticated. Following a tie-up with Vodafone, for instance, TomTom is soon to launch what it terms its 'High Definition (HD) Traffic' service in the UK. This service, already available in The Netherlands in the new TomTom ONE XL HD Traffic device, should be launched in the UK during the first half of 2008. It uses anonymous GSM data from Vodafone users alongside more conventional traffic information sources to provide highly accurate information on traffic flows and journey times based on the movement patterns of mobile phones.

With so many inputs from so many mobile phones on so many roads, the system should be more accurate than anything that has come before, suggests TomTom. To underline the point, it estimates that traditional RDS-TMC systems cover only 45 per cent of highways.

Vehicle-specific satnav

Satellite navigation devices are also increasingly becoming more vehicle-specific. Motorcycle riders, for example, have been offered waterproof systems with large, glove-friendly onscreen buttons and Bluetooth connected earpieces for some time by the major satnav providers such as TomTom and Garmin.

More recently, drivers of large vehicles like buses, coaches and trucks have started being catered for, too, as the two main digital mapping providers - Navteq and Tele Atlas - have both been developing large-vehicle-specific datasets to take account of the width, height and weight restrictions that apply to such vehicles, as well as other considerations such as special speed or route restrictions.

Systems based on these large-vehicle-specific maps are still a while off in the UK. Navteq only announced availability of its UK dataset in October, and Tele Atlas has only committed to making a large-vehicle-specific map of Great Britain available to solution providers by the end of this year. But as such sophisticated mapping does start to hit the market, it should help put an end to the many stories of large vehicles getting stuck on narrow country lanes or under bridges as a result of following 'standard' car-oriented satnav devices or no satnav device at all.

'I think it's certainly going to help,' says Peter Beaumont, marketing director of Navteq's Enterprise Europe division. 'A lot of vehicles that take unsuitable roads do tend to be driven by people who are unfamiliar with the local area, and this will provide additional guidance to help minimise the number of vehicles getting stuck under bridges or in narrow country lanes.'

Numerous satnav solutions providers including Siemens VDO, ALK Technologies and PTV Loxane have already committed to producing navigation solutions based on such maps in the next few months.

The role of mapping

The availability and quality of mapping are likely to remain central to the development of satellite navigation systems in the future, too. Ordnance Survey, which supplies basic digital road geometry and route information to the likes of Tele Atlas, suggests that there is still much to be done on this score to make satellite navigation more sophisticated in the future.

For one thing, the company is looking at putting together a national map of recommended freight routes, based on individual local authorities' preferred routes for trucks. Tom Satterthwaite, senior product manager at the firm, says he hopes work will start in earnest on this during 2008. OS is also looking at adding hill gradients to its maps, producing pedestrian- and cyclist-specific routes, and producing more accurate centre line mapping - literally making sure that the centre white line on roads is accurately reflected in its maps, so that curves in the road are presented more realistically.

One issue the industry needs to address, however, is the length of time it takes for satnav systems to reflect changes in the real world. As Satterthwaite points out, it typically takes months for changes in road layout to be reflected in satnav products, as the changes first need to be surveyed and confirmed by data providers like OS, then reflected in their regular updates to maps, then taken on by customers like Tele Atlas and merged into their final product, then passed on to device manufacturers and incorporated in their product offerings, and finally downloaded as updates by existing users or purchased by other users in new devices.

'The delay from a surveyor 'pinging' a change into a data collection device to Mr Smith seeing it in his satnav is generally months,' Satterthwaite says.

Making downloads easier, so that more users update their maps regularly, is another challenge, he says. 'Map updating is probably not as quick or easy at is should be. Ideally, maps could be updated as a matter of routine when vehicles are in for maintenance or servicing, and users should also be able to connect satnav systems wirelessly to a broadband home network, rather than having to remove devices to plug them in via a wired USB connection. But both options are still a long way off, Satterthwaite suggests.

Mapping could also be improved in terms of the way complex junctions are represented, says Satterthwaite - for example to guide motorists not just on which way to go, but also on which lane they should ideally be in. Such lane information could be gathered already, but it's a massive task, and there's no point in doing it yet because satnav devices themselves would need more powerful chips to handle the information. Because of the price-sensitivity in the market, however, device manufacturers won't put such chips in unless and until they're really called for - a classic chicken-and-egg situation.

It would also be advantageous, says Satterthwaite, if satellite navigation systems could divert motorists along a variety of different routes in the event of congestion on main roads, instead of sending them all the same way and simply causing more congestion elsewhere.

Developments such as these are clearly still some time off; but given the speed with which the satnav sector continues to evolve, we wouldn't like to hazard a guess on just how far. Watch this space!

PANEL

Satnav and logistics

Satnav is certainly booming in the consumer market, but take-up from the commercial vehicle sector has been less meteoric to date. Yet there are significant opportunities for the logistics sector to improve productivity and safety while reducing journey times, fuel consumption and overall mileages using satnav systems. So why the lack of take-up up to now?

'One barrier so far has been that the logistics-specific data hasn't been there to make it as efficient as possible,' says Clive Taylor of Garmin. 'Of course, large vehicle drivers can still use a consumer device, but if it sends them down consumer streets, that can be a problem.'

Like others, Garmin is now looking at producing truck-specific devices, and Taylor says he hopes the first of them will appear during 2008.

'The logistics market is getting more switched on to satnav now,' agrees Ian Crofts of Siemens VDO - which is also due to start offering devices with truck attributes next year. This is partly the result of new truck-specific mapping, he says, and partly down to the success of satnav devices in the consumer market. 'The explosion in personal navigation devices recently means that people now understand what the technology is and what it can really do.'

The providers of new truck-specific devices certainly have a big market to go at. A spokesman for Tele Atlas suggests there are over 30 million heavy trucks in operation in Europe, yet only 5 per cent have a fleet management system of any kind on board so far.

But it isn't just satnav solution providers that sell satnav systems; vehicle makers, too, frequently offer navigation devices as optional extras, and you could be forgiven for thinking that vendors of such vehicles might have boosted take-up in the logistics sector by supplying more vehicles with integrated satnav systems.

In fact, vehicle makers have had only varying success in putting satnav systems in front of users. Part of the problem is that a typical vehicle's development cycle is at least three years (even more for large commercial vehicles), so by the time a vehicle comes to market, any inbuilt satnav system is likely to be far behind current aftermarket alternatives.

The other issue, of course, is the cost. 'It just tends to be prohibitive,' confirms Nigel Emms, a spokesperson for van and truck maker Iveco, which offers satnav as an option on both light and heavy vehicle ranges. 'We have a lot of customers in the fleet and contract hire market who won't specify satnav because of the price. Anything that adds cost to the vehicle, they tend not to do.'

One answer, of course, is for vehicle makers to throw the satnav in free. But at the prices some fleet customers are willing to pay for their vehicles, that's not usually a viable option.

To m.logistics' knowledge, in fact, only one vehicle maker currently provides satnav as standard - Citroen, which fits the Trafficmaster Smartnav system as standard to all Dispatch and Relay panel vans.

The system, which includes RAC Trackstar stolen vehicle tracking, real-time congestion warnings and route guidance as well as a suite of wider fleet management features and functions, has been fitted to around 10,000 Citroen vans so far. And according to commercial vehicle operations manager Robert Handyside, it has played 'a key role' in rising sales of the firm's products. Sales of these two ranges are up over 5 per cent year on year, he says.

Whether other manufactures will ever follow suit remains to be seen, but Handyside says the system is much appreciated by customers, and contributes significantly to differentiating Citroen from its competitors.

PANEL

Alternative platforms

For the time being, the dedicated portable navigation device (PND) is by far the most common platform for satnav solutions; but others, like mobile phones and PDAs, are gaining ground, and many of the major PND manufacturers already produce additional solutions for such platforms.

David Quin, marketing director at specialist satnav software provider ALK Technologies, says that effectively PNDs are just PDAs without the PDA's extra functionality; and that PNDs are increasingly growing towards conventional PDA/mobile phone territory with the inclusion of SIM cards.

'More and more makes of PNDs are adding SIM cards now, and all they're trying to do is make them more like a phone. So why not just use a phone in the first place? The last thing most fleet managers want is to have to manage two sets of SIMs in the fieldÉ'

Mobile phone and PDA solutions can be just as fully featured as PND solutions and are generally cheaper, he points out - and there's also an environmental benefit to be gained from using existing devices for navigation, rather than investing in additional dedicated equipment. 'I'd be very interested to know what quantities of batteries, LCD screens and plastic could be saved this way,' he says.

People often assume a mobile phone or PDA won't be as good as a dedicated PND, but implementations of ALK's CoPilot software provide the same experience on any platform, Quin maintains. They use the same maps, the same 2D/3D views, the same voice directions, the same house number level of accuracy, and so on.

What's more, an increasing number of phones are now GPS-enabled, and some service providers are offering deals that can put that functionality in the hands of users for virtually nothing. 'If you buy a package from some mobile phone operators, they will give you the phone and the whole navigation package, so long as you sign up to the service contract,' Quin says. 'So if you're prepared to spend £35 to £40 a month, you can get a phone with the CoPilot system on it for free.'