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Garmin ecoRoute first observations
SergZak
341 Points
Some first observations of ecoRoute:
It's a pretty full featured fuel mileage calculator where you input your vehicle's fuel mileage (city/highway), type of fuel (unleaded/diesel/etc), price and other parameters. The fuel price can either be manually entered or downloaded via MSN Direct's fuel prices. If you're using the MSN data, only the price of the lowest grade fuel is used. If you use mid-grade or premium fuel you'll need to enter those fuel prices manually. One of the trip computer's data fields (bottom left which previously displayed Total Time) has now been changed to show Overall Fuel Cost.
Other features include a Driving Challenge game where you try and get as close to a score of 100 points which are calculated using various parameters of the way you drive like acceleration, deceleration, & speed.
As far as calculating routes using ecoRoute, there is now a Less Fuel option in the Route Preferences. I'm assuming this uses the various parameters you've entered in the ecoRoute settings to optimize your route.
Looks pretty interesting...
Screen shots
Edit: Note the new button/leaf icon with the 0 (zero) inside in the shot below...this is enabled when you're on a Driving Challenge. The number will change from 0-100 (100 being best) depending on your Driving Challenge score. The leaf has three color levels (red, yellow & green) which also indicates how economically you're driving. Pressing the button takes you to the Driving Challenge score screen (bottom shot) where you also have the option to stop your Challenge.
It's a pretty full featured fuel mileage calculator where you input your vehicle's fuel mileage (city/highway), type of fuel (unleaded/diesel/etc), price and other parameters. The fuel price can either be manually entered or downloaded via MSN Direct's fuel prices. If you're using the MSN data, only the price of the lowest grade fuel is used. If you use mid-grade or premium fuel you'll need to enter those fuel prices manually. One of the trip computer's data fields (bottom left which previously displayed Total Time) has now been changed to show Overall Fuel Cost.
Other features include a Driving Challenge game where you try and get as close to a score of 100 points which are calculated using various parameters of the way you drive like acceleration, deceleration, & speed.
As far as calculating routes using ecoRoute, there is now a Less Fuel option in the Route Preferences. I'm assuming this uses the various parameters you've entered in the ecoRoute settings to optimize your route.
Looks pretty interesting...
Screen shots
Edit: Note the new button/leaf icon with the 0 (zero) inside in the shot below...this is enabled when you're on a Driving Challenge. The number will change from 0-100 (100 being best) depending on your Driving Challenge score. The leaf has three color levels (red, yellow & green) which also indicates how economically you're driving. Pressing the button takes you to the Driving Challenge score screen (bottom shot) where you also have the option to stop your Challenge.
Comments
Hope its released for the 2x5 series already, will check when i get home from work tonight.
Edit: Corrected v4.60 to v4.80
I just ran Web Updater and it installed support for Eco Route along with a few other things. Garmin's web page for 2x5 Here
J
I will have it enabled today on my drive to work and will also give some impressions late tonight after I get home and have used it a little.
Chris, i also saw the voice updates, however, even after i installed them all, they still showed up in webupdater... so i am left wondering if they are actually new updates or not and whether i will actually be able to tell if newer voices do get released.
But, she still say "recalcu lat ting". I will replace this phrase soon using turboccc's program.
BTW, did you updated all voices, if you did not, maybe that is why it still shows up after you did it.
The fuel reports are nice... however, just gotta keep in mind that its all an estimate. You are asked to put in the city and highway mileage of your car, however as im sure most of us know, the mileage is not always constant.
EcoRoute then calculates an estimated mileage based on how you are driving.
The driving challenge calculates your score based on how you are accelerating/decelerating, etc. Nice little feature to have and may indeed promote better driving. Driving challenge also keeps track of your best scores, in case you wanted to see how you are doing over time. Again, driving challenge is not the most useful thing ever, but pretty fun to have nonetheless.
The mileage reports are nice as it keeps track of your trips. The information provided by the report includes, the date and the start and end locations (just address book name and street name) as well as:
Distance
Time Traveled
Average Fuel Economy (for the trip as calculated in fuel reports)
Fuel Cost (also just for the trip as calculated in fuel reports)
Carbon Footprint
On the unit, each trip is listed as a separate entry, with the Destination listed first, and a fr
I just opened the excel file that ecoroutes generates.... its not much different than the information you can view on the unit.. Most of this data is good to have, and certainly helps anyone keep track of their driving habits, but the distance per trip should be most useful to someone who drives for work and needs to keep track of it (For reimbursement, as long as their employer would accept this data generated by their GPS)
Personally I would have liked to have seen a little more input. I think it would have been nice allow the unit to track mileage between fillups then input the amount of gas used for the fillup. I think it would be able to generate more accurate mileage estimates and gas costs while driving, but would require much more manual input and certainly isnt as automated.
However, you can improve the accuracy of the fuel reports by calibrating your miles per gallon. This basically involves hitting the calibrate button and manually entering in your mpg (you calculate on your own when you fill up).
I have also noticed that after driving a route, the fuel report continues to calculate until you turn the unit off, even if you have turned the car off. I have not found a way to stop tracking time/carbon footprint. This is a bit annoying as it may throw off the calculations, though hopefully not by much.
Finally, they have also added a page of "Tips" Which is basically just text that details specific things you can do and ways to drive that will help improve your fuel economy.
Here are a few images (in addition to the ones sergzak posted)
Driving Challenge Scores display (seems to be a bug.... There should be only two scores in there so far, unless it just automatically displays your best score on top followed by the most recent)
Mileage Reports List Screen (Lists each individual mileage report. Looks like each one is generated only if you are following a route on your nuvi)
Detailed Mileage Report
Overall I think this is a nice update, and provides a lot of nice information about driving habits and fuel economy and it definitely feels as if it belongs with the device rather than just being tacked on over the original software.
I was quite happy with my Nuvi before, and can only say I am more happy with it now!
Woops just figured i would add that it seems the fuel report screen and the mileage reports contain much of the same information, however it seems that the fuel report screen is a running counter whereas the mileage reports are generated on a per trip basis (hope I didnt already say that). Also, I am not sure if the spreadsheet that is generated gets deleted when the mileage reports are reset.
Edit: Just wanted to add that as soon as a route is entered on the unit, a new mileage report is generated for that route, regardless of whether you actually travel it or not. In fact, I just put one in to play around with adding vias along the route and I ended up with a mileage report that had a distance of 86 miles, but all the other fields were listed as 0. A little annoying, but only an issue if you dont actually travel the route you enter. I am not sure how it would react though if you deviate from the route it picks, whether it will list the distance as the original routed distance or the final distance driven.
It is kind of distracting watching the fuel mileage go up as you are driving...oh well.
J
Rut...Ro..........new world record in a Prius. :shock:
http://www.scangauge.com
Just a matter of time (and money). :lol:
I'd love to see them add a proper Businesslike trip log that would log your mileage in an exportable format for tax purposes.
In addition to being viewable on the unit itself, the trip log is also recorded in MS Excel spread sheet (.csv) format on the unit.
And, to each his or her own. Ive seen a lot of people on these forums unhappy with their GPS units, as well as those who are happy with them. I think this does provide some nice extra features and some good information on driving habits, but I realize that not everyone will be excited for it and some just wont care.
I think with some tweaking (such as allowing the fuel report to be stopped for times when the car is not running, and the mileage reports not tied directly into a route) ecoroute could be even better than it is.
Jrobb, yea I think the worst feature of this is that it may be distracting while driving.... I just bought my GPS about two weeks ago, and im still learning to try and ignore it as much as possible while moving... heh.
I think I also found a bug, if the calibration is used then the ecochallenge game stops working.
I had to reset the car info to get the ecochallenge working again.
J
I have a SG2, already.
I regularly get around 50mpg.
How does this driving challenge calculate things?
It can be dangerous to travel at speeds widely different from the rest of the traffic, the alternative is to use smaller roads but not all of these are designed for handling large volumes of traffic and are not as safe to drive on. I think some sort of balance is needed but this is probably not as easy as it sounds.
However I'm not knocking it, the idea behind ecoRoute is a good one and all-in-all I think it is very useful, hopefully it will be fine-tuned over time.
in any way to cost money AND/or make you feel guilty :lol: