My faith in Tomtom for all but the most basic routes has been on the wane for a while now, but trying to plot a route across Europe is obviously beyond it.
Birmingham to Nurburg, everything is fine up to Brussels but after that it all starts going pear shaped. Here's what Autoroute reckons:
You'll note how it takes a sensible route along the main motorways, coming down to the East of Nurburg and then cutting back across to the West at the end. This route is about 500 miles.
Now this is what TomTom 5 comes up with, albeit reproduced in Autoroute:
You'll notice here that it's taken a far more direct route, cutting out motorways in favour of smaller roads.
The Tomtom route is about 30 miles shorter but critically will take far longer to complete due to the nature of the roads involved.
It's clear that Tomtom's routing engine is a piece of junk. I think what's confusing it here is that the best route involves travelling in a counter-intuitive direction for a while, i.e. to the North and West of the destination, prior to coming "back in" as it were. It obviously doesn't consider any roads which would take you away from the destination which is a fatal flaw. I should also note that this wondrous route took around 20 minutes to calculate on my PDA!!
There appears to be no way to convince TT to take the correct route and so in this case I'd probably be best reverting to a map. Nice one
Birmingham to Nurburg, everything is fine up to Brussels but after that it all starts going pear shaped. Here's what Autoroute reckons:
You'll note how it takes a sensible route along the main motorways, coming down to the East of Nurburg and then cutting back across to the West at the end. This route is about 500 miles.
Now this is what TomTom 5 comes up with, albeit reproduced in Autoroute:
You'll notice here that it's taken a far more direct route, cutting out motorways in favour of smaller roads.
The Tomtom route is about 30 miles shorter but critically will take far longer to complete due to the nature of the roads involved.
It's clear that Tomtom's routing engine is a piece of junk. I think what's confusing it here is that the best route involves travelling in a counter-intuitive direction for a while, i.e. to the North and West of the destination, prior to coming "back in" as it were. It obviously doesn't consider any roads which would take you away from the destination which is a fatal flaw. I should also note that this wondrous route took around 20 minutes to calculate on my PDA!!
There appears to be no way to convince TT to take the correct route and so in this case I'd probably be best reverting to a map. Nice one