3 January 2012

PRODUCT EVALUATION Truck-specific satellite navigation system

Could the latest TomTom ProTruck unit get our editor to Spain?

When TomTom gave us the opportunity to be one of the first to try its latest truck-related satnav, the Protruck 9150, it coincided with a planned trip to Spain. What better way to put it through its paces?

Out of the box

When we opened the box, our first surprise was the welcome absence of the familiar multitude of connectors, ear phones and antennae that you get with other systems. There’s a vehicle cradle; a rotating swivel mount; a USB connector serial cable; and a vehicle cigarette-lighter style charger with a USB port at one end.

You also get a carry case, a quick-start leaflet and an instruction booklet. But that’s it. No mains cable, with UK and continental socket ends, no ear piece, no antennae.

This minimalism is, it turns out, a deliberate strategy on TomTom’s part, not a packaging mistake. The vehicle cradle becomes, effectively, a powered mobile docking port for the ProTruck unit. (TomTom calls it an "active windscreen mount"). It has a magnetic powered connector to slot the device in, while at the rear there is a DC connector and USB port. In the vehicle, the unit recharges via the cradle; out of the vehicle, it recharges via the USB port.

The first job is to connect it to the computer to charge it fully and log on to the My TomTom Web site to check for software and map updates. If you can’t get round to this straight away, you do have 90 days to download the latest map free of charge. After that, there’s an update fee. Once downloaded, the MyTomTom application alerts you to any further updates.

Day two

Route planning

First step is to set the vehicle profile on the ProTruck 9150. There are five choices: car, van, truck, bus or coach, and taxi, each with its own clear icon. This step is important because weight and height dimensions make a difference to routing and navigation, especially for a truck.

The truck vehicle profiles are detailed: height, length, gross weight, axle weights and maximum speed. All these restrict access to certain roads – those with a low bridge, for example.

When planning a truck journey, the ProTruck favours major roads; assumes you are travelling at a lower average speed when calculating journey times; and selects routes without major turns. Without the right profile data it might decide on a different, perhaps shorter, route, but one involving a tighter right-hand turn that an articulated truck would struggle to make. It might also calculate an inaccurate arrival time on the basis of the legal speed limit for a car or van.

Second step is to plan our route. Our first attempt was not successful. When we input St Albans as the starting point and Spanish town Benissa as the finishing point, the ProTruck routed us through France. Fair enough, perhaps, but in fact we were planning to catch ferry from Plymouth to Santander in northern Spain (as, indeed, do many truck operators, whose drivers even get their own dedicated lounge on board ship.). It may be a 23-hour ferry trip, but it saves on tolls and fuels in France.

Entering "via Santander" didn’t solve this problem, so we opted to set up the trip details two legs: one in the UK and the other in Spain.

Once the route has been planned you can view it either with text directions or by scrolling through the map. Scrolling shows you when a possible route has been blocked because of truck-related restrictions on the map. The blocked road sections are shown in purple, and include potential hazards such as low bridges.

It would be handy to be able to set the arrival time in route planning so it could calculate the leaving time. Just a detail.

Day Three

St Albans to Plymouth

We’ve got TomTom’s Live traffic service enabled for the UK leg of the trip. This is a scrolling panel on the right-hand side of the device that alerts you to any delay on your route, telling you how many miles ahead it is and how much extra time it will add to your journey.

We’re travelling on a Sunday, and there are no reported delays when we start, but later on the trip we get an alert about an accident on the M5 which has slowed traffic down and pushed our estimated arrival time back by five minutes.

Day four

At sea

Out of interest, we turn on the ProTruck. Obviously it has no mapping for the middle of the ocean, but we do persuade it to give us a latitude and longitude based on the GPS signal. Pointless but satisfying.

Day five

Santander to Zagoza, Benissa, Valencia

We didn’t bother, but you can set the ProTruck device to warn you to drive on the left. This is a fairly straightforward route, mainly motorway. However, updating your map regularly in Spain is essential, rather than advisable. Spain is still investing in its road infrastructure (with the Help of EU money), and upgrades to major routes happen frequently.

We were hardly out of the port before getting a live demonstration of this. Since our last road trip on this route a year earlier, there had been a major improvements around Santander and Bilbao. In Santander they want to stop ferry traffic travelling through the town, and at Bilbao they have opened a tunnel to connect two previously separate motorways.

Trusting the ProTruck, we simply sailed through both changes to rejoin a familiar route. Without it, I'm sure we would have ended up in the wrong lane and ultimately on the wrong road, and then taking ten minutes or longer to find our way back: bad enough in a car, let alone a van.

Multi-lane inverted-Y motorway confluences are a feature of Spanish roads and city bypasses, and are probably familiar there as clover-leaf junctions are to any UK driver. Three lanes briefly become six or more, before splitting off again into separate routes.

The unfamiliarity of this – trying to spot which road you want while driving a right-hand drive vehicle – is stressful to say the least. Identifying the correct road in time to edge your way on to it is not helped by the fact that major roads and motorways carry both the Spanish road name and the green EU road designation – so the A8 is also the E70, for example. That’s a lot of information to assimilate in traffic in a short space of time.

We were curious to know if the satnav would be able to cope with this, but it did in the main. I do think it’s exactly this sort of situation where satnavs come into their own. Yes, you do have to trust them, but the clear vocal instructions combined with large lane-guidance screen pictures really do help you make your mind up!

Day 5

Logrono to Zaragoza

A long stretch on the nearly-empty AP68, of motorway through the scenic Rioja region, but also the most expensive toll-wise. ProTruck offers the choice of avoiding toll routes, and we could have taken the N232 for much of the way an (it runs virtually parallel with the motorway for much of its length, as is often the case in Spain). In a car we would have taken the scenic option. But a pre-trip check on the ProTruck's "avoid tolls" option revealed a steep climb up a single-carriage hill on the alternative route, which wasn’t particularly enticing in a van.

Just before Zaragoza we needed to stop for fuel, and again the satnav came in handy, as our fuel stop turned out to be a short distance off the motorway. We had selected petrol stations as Points of Interest because we knew that motorway service stations are rare on this particular stretch.

Day 5

Zaragoza to Valencia

After a quick pit stop, we head off again. Zaragoza is probably the trickiest point on the route; it’s a major industrial city with routes converging from all directions, and there’s no direct link between the motorway you are on and the one you are aiming for.

Unbeknown to us, and more significantly, to the ProTruck device, the Spanish authorities chose to partially open a new bypass that day, and we unexpectedly found ourselves at Zaragoza University.

It was at this point that we wished we’d had TomTom’s Map Share feature activated for Europe. Alerting the TomTom Spanish community to these changes would got them out there far faster than waiting for some official notification of a road change, and been really useful for anyone travelling through the region.

Day 5

Valencia to Benissa

Valencia is another town where road changes have been frequent. Fortunately, the ProTruck steers us seamlessly from the A23 on to the AP7/E17 coast motorway.

The ProTruck points out that our planned destination is in fact a dead end. (Knowing this, we’d turned on the alert for this to if it would work.) Turning a car or van around in a constricted place might be difficult but achievable, whereas with a large truck or articulated vehicle around can be impossible, and a long reversing manoeuvre becomes the only option.

Restriction warnings are given if you are driving without navigation or if you are disregarding instructions. If warnings are switched on and your destination is located in a dead end road, a warning message is shown after route planning.

Then before entering the dead end road, you are reminded by a warning icon shown in the Driving View so that you can react in time. A restriction warning icon is shown if a known restriction on the road you are driving on conflicts with your vehicle profile.

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