Sometimes the choices that manufacturers make in products just leave me shaking my head. For many of these things I can except the fact that I am not the target customer. I am a power user, but most products are made with the casual user in mind. This particular issue though leaves me shaking my head when I consider the viewpoint of any user of the product.
The Garmin 3590 is their flagship consumer product. It includes an app called trip planner. Trip planner is a great feature that allows you to build a trip in advance including multiple stopovers and route waypoints. A great option within trip planner is the ability to define a stopped duration time at any of the defined waypoints.
On Wednesday, I had a need to drive from Des Moines Iowa to Chicago Illinois and back in the same day with only a short 30 minutes stop in Chicago for some quick business. I know, it's insane, but some things just have to be done. There were two very important ETA's in this route. My ETA in Chicago was very very important. In addition I had to be home at a specific time in order to participate in one of my daughters activities. I knew exactly where I would stop for gas and exactly where I would stop for lunch. I built this route within the trip planner app and included the gas station stops as well as lunch and provided stopover times at each of these waypoints. Imagine my surprise when I activated this route and found that Garmin takes none of this stop over time into account into the ETA they present. They do take the additional driving time to get to the waypoint but they do not take the stop time into account. Absolutely insane.
If I build a waypoint into a route for a gas station, the route planner allows me to tell it that my stop time will be say, 20 minutes. If I am building a cross-country route that I will take in our RV, and I have three gas stops along the way, that is an hour of time that I will be stopped on my route. Using this feature, it allows me to get a more accurate picture of my route that day due to my stops.
So I am taking the time to build this route and I'm spoon feeding Garmin's routing algorithm the fact that the route will take one hour longer than it should, yet Garmin completely ignores this information.
I would love to hear the explanation for this one.
