TomTom’s new mapping platform and ecosystem

I also noticed a quirk where it would send me 2km down a road just to turn back and drive the 2km back to where I came from. First few times I thought I must have added a waypoint but nope - sometimes it just makes you waste time.

Apple Maps might be better but I can't use it as it has a quirk with "Environmental Zones" in Germany. There are 3 kinds of zones: Red, Yellow and Green. Your car has a badge with a color (depends on how environmentaly friendly it is). So a green badge can enter every zone, a yellow badge only yellow and red zones, and a red badge only red zones.

Now whenever Apple Maps encounters such a zone in the route the navigation switches to a waaaay zoomed out view (tends to display the whole route on a map). So you can't really see the next turn, etc.

To get rid of that view Apple Maps expects you to click on OK. Which really sucks while driving.

What's infuriating is that you can't turn off the env zone checking or even just tell Maps that "my car has a green badge so PLEAS FOR F SAKES STOP PESTERING ME EVERY TIME YOU ENCOUNTER A ZONE". (Those zones are very common - every bigger town is a green zone. So Apple Maps becomes _really_ unusable on longer trips).

DonHopkins 5 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: TomTom to cut 10% of jobs due to improved automati...

I worked at TomTom in Amsterdam from 2007-2009, and had a fun time and learned a lot working with some smart people at a great company that treated us well and had good leadership.

But TomTom was just on the cusp of a small company turning into a big company.

And the savings and loan crisis was about to cause the economy to collapse.

Then TomTom got into a bidding war with Garmin over Tele Atlas.

So they ended up borrowing a whole lot of money at a really bad time.

Just as the iPhone was hitting the market, and Google and Apple were rolling out free maps and turn-by-turn navigation on smart phones that everybody already had.

I wrote about that earlier in the discussion about Etak:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13747015

DonHopkins on Feb 27, 2017 | parent | context | favorite | on: Who Needs GPS? The Story of Etak's 1985 Car Naviga...

"Etak eventually became a part of TomTom, ensuring that its map data, some of which was first digitized back during the Navigator's development in 1984, would live on to this day."

The story of how TomTom and not Garmin ended up owning the data originally digitized at Etak is interesting. At the time, there were only two digital map companies: Tele Atlas (from which TomTom got their map data) and Navteq (from which Garmin got their map data).

From Wikipedia [1]:

"On July 23, 2007, a €2 billion offer for the company by navigation system maker TomTom was accepted by the Tele Atlas board. This was then trumped by a €2.3 billion offer from United States-based rival Garmin on October 31, 2007 initiating a bidding war for Tele Atlas. TomTom responded by upping their bid to €2.9 billion, an offer which was again approved by the board of Tele Atlas. Garmin had been expected to counterbid once again: with Tele Atlas' main global rival Navteq subject to a takeover bid from Nokia, the company had stated that it did not wish both companies to fall into the hands of rivals. However, after striking a content agreement with Navteq through the year 2015, Garmin withdrew its takeover offer, clearing the way for TomTom. On December 4, 2007, TomTom shareholders approved the takeover. The European Commissioner for Competition cleared the takeover in May 2008, and it closed in June."

TomTom (where I worked at the time) was shocked and dismayed that Garmin outbid them by €300 million on Tele Atlas, because while it made a lot of sense for TomTom to buy their own map data supplier, it would have been prohibitively complex and expensive for Garmin, who used Navteq data, to switch map data sources and retool their entire map data digestion, distribution and error correction pipelines.

TomTom was so determined to buy Tele Atlas and keep it out of Garmin's hands, that they raised their bid by €900 million.

In the meantime, Garmin renegotiated their deal with Navteq, so they didn't have to pay as much for the data, and didn't have to switch map suppliers.

The stunt that Garmin pulled off was, in my opinion, an ingenious head-fake that cost TomTom an enormous amount of money, almost a billion euros, and at the same time saved Garmin a whole lot of money by enabling them to renegotiate a better deal with Navteq, who was faced with losing their major customer if they didn't lower their prices.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tele_Atlas

This drives me absolutely batty. No matter how much I zoom in, I cannot see exit number labels. Sometimes they show up, at random places along the exit ramp, but I haven't figured out the rhyme or reason how.

Real maps clearly label exit numbers of every exit. I don't understand why this is so hard for Google Maps.

And it works. It works always (even more than GMaps because it's offline first). It's also accurate. And up to date.