Issue with Navigation During Mini Road Trip

[ronb5000]

Hello all,

I experienced a strange issue during a weekend roundtrip drive from DC to Virginia Beach this past weekend. Even though I know the route well, I like using the navigation system because it shows the ETA and distances. Going down, there were mostly no issues. I did notice that the car's navigation system usually had me going on a route that took longer, which was verified by watching the ETA change when I decided to manually override the directions from the navigation system. You would think the system would always elect to send you on the shortest/quickest route possible.

On the way back, I was able to charge in the hotel garage the night before, so we started with a 90% charge, which would provide me with plenty of charge for the trip back and leave about 30 miles to spare. Due to traffic, we took a different route home and I noticed a problem similar to what we experienced on the way down. Not only did the navigation system keep pointing me to a route that took longer, but it also would have required a stop to charge (and it even provided me the location and distance to that charging point). Only after repeatedly ignoring the system's pleas for me to turn around and go back in the direction of the charging station, did it eventually correct itself and realize that I had plenty of juice to take the most efficient route home. Either there is a bug in the navigation software, or this is most ineffective navigation software in existence (possibly funded by the charging station companies!).

I quickly searched through the forums and didn't see any other threads that highlighted a similar problem. Has anyone else experienced this? This has essentially caused me to lose faith in the car's navigation system, and resort back to running Google Maps on my iPhone as I drive. Luckily this was a route I was already familiar with......I don't think I'd trust this system in an unfamiliar area.

Thanks!

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[SpacePony]

One thing about the navigation is that not only does it check if you can make it to your destination, but it also makes sure when you arrive at your destination, you'll have enough charge to make it back to a public charger again. So if your destination is 100 miles from the closest known charger, it will plan the trip to make sure you still have over 100 miles left when you reach your destination.

Which means if your home is a significant distance from a known public charger, then it might have thought you weren't going to be within range of a charger at your destination/home, and therefore was trying to add a charger to make sure it didn't strand you.

==A Good Fix for this==
Note that you can go into your Navigation Settings > Guidance > Add Chargers Automatically. It defaults to "Always," but you can change it to "Always Ask" (which it actually only asks when it thinks that chargers will be needed, not for shorter routes well within your vehicle range) or "Never."

In your instance, setting it to "Always Ask" would mean when you began routing, it would ask if you wanted to add chargers, and you could dismiss it without adding them, and then you would not have had this problem.