Do you find GPS useful in the car?

Does anyone use after market GPS device from Garmin/Trimble for your car?

Do you find a GPS useful in preventing you from getting lost on the road?

I am considering getting after market GPS for the car. I have tendency of getting lost.

We live in a RV. No fixed location so we move constantly. We use GPS constantly. So we are never lost, even in unknown cities or very rural roads.

Perhaps not necessary if you only drive the same roads everyday, but if you travel in unknown areas, I consider a GPS a must have item.

I have a Garmin GPSMap 60 and I do find it useful when driving. It's not ideal for in-car navigation as it doesn't have voice output (it just beeps at you) or traffic condition updates. However, it is a handheld device which can also be used for waking or on a bicycle, so it's quite versatile.

Yes, though I never have used it yet for that.

I have an old Garmin GPS V that also doesn't talk, the beeps are all I need, voice would be an annoyance. I use mine primarily for ETA's and making fuel stop decisions. When I get in town with lots of streets and different ways to get someplace, it's nice to know that if I miss my turn or take the wrong street the GPS just recalculates a different route. It's hard to get lost.

If I have coordinates for my destination my simple handheld GPS is quite useful. Having an arrow pointing "over there" as I miss my turn and have to loop back has been very helpful. On a business trip a colleague drove 30 minutes beyond the turnoff before he realized he'd missed it. (He was an hour late.)

That's a pretty basic use of GPS and is about all I seem to need. The biggest trick with it is getting coordinates for addresses. In one case I learned that a particular street had house numbers that followed the Japanese style of being in chronological order rather than logical order :-) GPS helped me find the street but the database didn't have the right house order. (I had to call & ask)

Routing, talking, suggesting routes by the GPS is unknown to me.

I bought a TomTom Go 910 when I drove to San Francisco...wouldn't have been nearly as fun a drive without it. Around home it spends most of it's time in it's case but if I need to find a place I've never been to before, it's the first thing I turn on in the Jeep.

Ours is a Magellan Meridian handheld, with a powered mount in the P/U, and their Mapserve Topo data loaded in it for whatever location we happen to be. Not as good as some of the GPS units that are designed specifically for vehicle use (screen is pretty small by comparison), but good enough for most of our needs...

I have a Garmin 330 (I think). Its the flat screen unit. It does great! I serve legal documents as a side business and it has never let me down. We drove from WI to FL and never opened a map one time from my house all the way to my brother in laws, it took us right to their door. It tells you to take the lane changes and all. I got the model with the built in MP3 player and hooked up a FM radio converter to it so it would play the music through the car stereo. It takes an SD card or you can load music into the internal memory. I recommend them to anyone traveling into unknown territory.

Huck

The GPS is only as good as the maps you have stored in it.
I use it while geocaching and I have encountered mysterious roads on the map where only a farmers field lay. I've also found roads that I normally wouldn't have found because I blinked as I drove by.

It is useful but be careful you don't follow the electronic maps religiously as sometimes you'll end up in somebodies yard or worse.

That's why the voice navigation feature had been implemented. You eyes are concentrated on the surroundings. Your extremities - on driving. And you ears listen to the prompt directions...

I was entirely convinced of the voice navigation supremacy when once missed my exit in the unfamiliar remote place in the dark rainy night and completely lost on a complicated freeway ramps system. It was not possible to see any road signs behind the rain, and dense but speedy traffic was still there. So I just turned on (in 2 touches of the screen) the voice on my PDA (I have it connected to the wireless GPS unit and running TomTom software) and was at the door of my friends in no time without any stress feeling. Actually I felt like piloting a plane in the fog using only the cockpit gauges (instrument flying). My only desire was for some short range circular radar to see the other cars better