The way the system is now, it's false advertising. Those 6 million POIs are not searchable. You can one by one go through every category and you will not find any more than the 3 Pepboys I have posted. I'm sure that is the case for many other businesses. I can easily locate a gas station or restaurant, but anything specific outside of those it nearly impossible.

 

I think we need some clarification. TheOfficeMaven's investigation seemed to indicate that all 6 million POI's are in categories (i.e. accessible) and the 3 PepBoys listings are in fact the only ones on the entire disc.

 

I agree, it sux big time, but false advertising is not a slam dunk. In actuality, the advertising says you can search THROUGH a list of 6M in 102 cats. I have no doubt that a tough states AG would likely certify a class action but MINI/BMW's retained firms have a few things like, in their website: While BMW NA makes all reasonable efforts to provide accurate information on this site, there is no guarantee or warranty of accuracy. Furthermore, we do not assume any liability for the accuracy or completeness of information presented on this site."

And in the manual: "To ensure that our accessories and in-car equipment continue to combine advanced technology with unexcelled levels of quality, we at MINI pursue a policy of continuous, ongoing development embracing every aspect of design. It is therefore possible that some of your own vehicle's equipment and features may vary from those described in this manual. We are also unable to guarantee that all of the descriptions and illustrations contained in the manual will be completely accurate in all respects. We must therefore request your understanding for the fact that we are unable to recognize legal claims based on the data, descriptions and illustrations in this manual and your own vehicle's equipment.

I really don't think we'll be hearing from them any time soon IMHO

 

D'oh!!

 

Give me a bit and I'll indeed verify this for everyone. I believe that all the PepBoys locations would be under the BUSINESS AND SERVICES section. That section is HUGE and I'm having trouble fitting a SEARCH ALL category for it on the DVD (as I'm out of disc space). Once I squeeze it on there, I'll do the search and let you what I find.

 

Birdman,

While I remain skeptical, like others, of the success of a legal fight on this... I still applaud your desire to take a stand.

I would have one request though - please ensure to include 1st Gen MINIs in the legal discussions as well, both because the same promises were made for the POIs in our systems, and the fact that the 1st Gen MINI Nav system is still available for sale in 2007 & 2008 MINI Cooper Convertibles (R52s), so it is still on the market today.

Besides, I guarantee that at the moment, there's still a lot more 1st Gen MINI Nav systems in existence out there than 2nd Gen... so the potential number of affected consumers is much larger if you include the 1st Gens.

 

@Edge,

Not that it matters, but my fix will work for both 1st and 2nd gen cars. In fact, the 1st gen cars will be the one I get going first as that's what I drive. The 2nd gen MINI is the wife's.

 

Okay, I've now completed a quick search of ALL 6 million POIs on the 2007-2 map DVD and these are the ONLY Pep Boys locations I can find (assuming there really is 6 million POIs on the DVD that is):

BUSINESS AND SERVICES

-75.18037,40.00514,"PEP BOYS","","PHILADELPHIA, PA","W ALLEGHENY AVE","3111","215-430-9095","19132"

-75.40042,39.76294,"PEP BOYS","LOGAN TWP","SWEDESBORO, NJ","PEDRICKTOWN RD","522","856-467-0873","08085"

CAR AND TRAVEL

-121.26044,38.11629,"HERTZ-LODI PEPBOYS","","LODI, CA","S CHEROKEE LN","1401","209-333-3361","95240"

Thus, it looks like the problem has more to do with the fact that there aren't many Pep Boys locations in the POI database than it does with locating them.

 

Gag. One can only hope that PepBoys is some oddball hole in the DB. It's especially odd (and annoying) when you consider some of the incredibly obscure one-of-a-kind businesses that will come up in a search.

 

From the Navteq website: "Subscribe to NAVTEQ DIRECT ACCESS, and every one of your stores will be precisely positioned on the NAVTEQ® map, a map used for an estimated 6 million routing decisions each day."

Pep Boys is just cheap...

 

Maybe. I doubt all the businesses on in the DB are shelling out $$$. Maybe they only exclude the big chains if they don't pay the extortion fee.

 

No manufacturer is required by law to produce a product that is as good as the best competitor in its market, or even to be as good as the average product in its market. The price charged does not reflect the quality or value of the item.
I agree entirely that this navigator could be much better at some things, while in other areas it excels.
Frivolous lawsuits add greatly to the cost of everything we buy. It also slows down inovation when manufacturers are afraid to bring out new products due to litigation fears. (See anti-lock breaks and new aircraft for example.) Twenty five percent of the cost of a motorcycle helment is due to helmet makers being sued when injuries occur!
The data on a DVD system will ALWAYS be a year old. Don't tell me how perfect other systems are, because I know that they are not!
Finding a Long Island winery that was "hidden" in the category Wine & Liquor was not so hard for this ignorant person.

 

Okay folks here's what I have so far...

I've managed to get everything completely set up and working as far as the new SEARCH ALL menu goes. It's very cool! My only real problem left to deal with is the free disc space issue for the map DVD. There's just not enough free space available on the disc (and on the 2nd gen MINI's DVD there's almost nothing available to start with) to add in the complete "SEARCH ALL" menu. Thus, I'm still trying to find a way to work around this problem. I went ahead and burned a dual-layer map DVD and surprisingly the nav computer in my 1st gen MINI could read it. It seems to be a little slow though and it acts like it is struggling to grab the data off the disc all the time. I'll have to do some more testing with this to see if it's just the brand of dual-layer DVD I'm using or if the nav computer is just not going to be able to cope with it.

Anyway, here are some screen shots of how I've set things up so far (using the dual-layer DVD). I welcome your feedback/input. Please note that the screen shots are of the nav system in my 1st gen MINI, but they will be exactly the same for the 2nd gen MINI as well (I'll do that one next if I can resolve the free space issue).

As mentioned in my previous posts, instead of using one HUGE "SEARCH ALL" POI category at the top-level, I went a head and added a "SEARCH ALL" menu at the top-level instead:



Doing it this way helps spread the large number of POIs out a bit and speeds up the searching. Basically, instead of having to search over 100 sub-categories, you can now search only 6 (and you should be able to narrow down the POI you're looking for to just one or two really).

Once you select the "SEARCH ALL" menu you are taken to a second page where you can select the top-level category in which you want to search ALL of its POIs in a single shot:



Once you've selected the top-level category you are taken to the search criteria screen/page:



You can indeed have your own cool graphic inserted here. I can't remember where I found this one, but it fit the search all theme great as well as being a very close match for my own MINI. If the graphic belongs to anyone in these forums please forgive me for not giving you due credit (I couldn't remember where I pulled it from). I will remove it at your request if so desired.

Note that I also went ahead and created a custom push pin icon that is used to display the search all category POIs on the map. Here's what they look like on the map:

In 2D View



In 3D View



Enjoy and sorry for the cruddy pics (as usual).

 

I'm guessing that there is no way to sort the POIs geographically? If space was an issue, most people would probably be happy with two discs, each covering half of the country. Maybe a third for the middle people, so no one is changing discs except on a cross country drive.
This is probably something Navtech could do, but we can't at home.

 

Very cool. Thanks for all the work!

Here's a note in Wikipedia that may be relevant:

 

Actually, it is indeed doable. Unfortunately, it would be a lot of work though and not a job I'm willing to undertake at this point. I'm pretty sure that I'll be able to squeeze the SEARCH ALL data onto the DVD for the 1st gen MINIs, but the 2nd gen is where the problem will lie. Maybe the nav computer in the 2nd gen MINIs will be able to cope with DL DVDs better and it won't be a problem at all. I imagine that NavTeq had to consider this at some point seeing at the DVD for the 2nd gen cars is near full already. If they try to add too much more data to it in future versions, they'll run into the problem as well (although it would be easier for them to consolidate the data I'm sure).

 

It was no problem really. It took a lot of work for sure, but it was fun doing it.

Yes, that would explain it. The trouble is the drive seems to have to make the pause quite frequently when accessing the data. Almost to the point of where I feel that it's unusable.

BTW, for the SEARCH ALL categories, I've omitted all of the address information from the POIs in order to save space. The only data in there is the location coordinates, the names of the POIs, and the telephone numbers of the POIs (so that you can call the POI via your built in Bluetooth phone prep). Maybe I'll just have to remove the phone numbers in order to make it all fit???

 

HA! Just noticed that I FINALLY made it to 6th gear. It only took me a mere 3 years and 2 months to do it. WOW!

 

Can't wait to see how things are resolved for the 2nd gen stuff, but I'm glad you're keeping us in the loop with your 1st gen experiments! Keep up the good work!!

~Neal

 

No you need to fire the entire QA department that let QC get away with this.

 

..

 

Nobody is comparing the MINI nav to others, that would be just WAY TOO embarrasing!!

BUT, when you sell a product, especially at a premium price, the product must perform AS ADVERTISED. The mini nav DOES NOT PERFORM AS ADVERTISED, period, plain and simple. We are NOT asking for the Mini nav to be the best Nav system on the market. I'm not even asking for it to perform as good as my $80 Handheld Garmin GPS (Which DOES find all it's POI's in proper catagories or by searching for their name!!). What I'm asking for, AND WILL GET, is the MINI NAV to perform as to what was advertised. "To search 6 million POI's". And agian, would indicate you can FIND them, in a reasonable manner, which you currently CAN NOT!!

Tom, I suggest you come out from behind the keyboard and explain who you REALLY are. It's quite obvious you work for MINI or BMW, or maybe Navtech?? You aught to be ashamed of yourself. Instead of wasting your time trying to fight a rolling snowball, FIX THE PROBLEM!!!!

Or, give me my $2,100 BACK!!!!! You have a choice, do it the easy way, or do it the HARD WAY. Your choice!!

The amazing thing to me in all this is, while we duscuss it here, WE the paying customer ARE FIXING THE PROBLEM!!! Does that make sense to you as an employee of MINI/BMW/Navtech???? Why don't YOU just fix it for US!!!!

Wouldn't that be easier, and cheaper???? So it is YOUR FAULT it will cost you millions, not a frivolous lawsuit.

 

Edge, Undertsood, thanks. They will be creating a link on the law firms website were you can and should register to take part in the litigation. I'll post info on it when it becomes available. It wll be some time before it's filed officially, apparently they have to wait a certain time period after the initial complaint to allow the company time to solve the issue without litigation. I'm no law guy, so it's all greek to me, but I can tell ya they are going full speed on it cause apparently many of them have BMW's!! funny really. The main attorney said and I quote: "...this will be a quick and easy case for us and we are 100% certain of the outcome...."

 

I can't believe they haven't already. (shaking my head!!)

I'll say this again, I just can't FATHOM how MINI lets this out like this!! I just can't, it's astonishing really.

 

But, haven't we established (at least in the case of the PEP Boys example) that this is largely due to the POI just plain old not being there? That advertised statement doesn't guarantee we'll find whatever we like- it's already been mentioned that 6 million POI's will hardly cover every business, park, and landmark in the country.

Personally, I'd consider a gratis updated maps disk with changes similar to TheOfficeMaven's work and some sort of dealer credit for the loss of functionality a reasonable resolution for the immediate problem, with a warranty OS update in the future.

Which, as far as we know is still an option, right? Granted, it's a long shot and your legal filing may have a large stake in that, but there's still the possibility that this could be taken care of without overly forcing the issue.

While I may be playing devil's advocate here, I think it's also important to note that we (the Royal We there... that is to say, TheOfficeMaven) aren't fixing the problem itself- it's a bandage that lessens it's effect, but the real problem is still there and is going to take some cash and a lot of work for each of us that wants to apply it. Not just that, but double-stacking POI categories like that reduces space for an increased number of POIs in the future.