Nothing overly groundbreaking there then.

Not sure I could be bothered to connect my nuvi to the car's brain, how simple actually is it to do, does it really give any benefits?

Maybe catching up with TomTom's routing might be more useful......

Ok, that is quite interesting, I had visions of delving around hunting for some obscure port under the rocker cover or something!!

OBD-II was manditory for all Petrol engined cars sold in Europe since 2001 and Diesels since 2003 although depending upon the manufacturer some cars were equipped with the capability earlier than this, for more more information have a look at WiKi the diagnostic port is normally in the cars interiour, footwell, center console, under the dashboard.

An OBD-II reader is great fun for pin pointing faults with a car or simply watching gauges on a PDA pffering a digital dashboard, it will be interesting to see what Garmin offer via the interface but a cabled install is a bad move, I already own and use a Bluetooth OBD-II port reader ICW an old PDA for displaying the parameters I am interested in.

Anything adding cables around the driver in a car isn't clever for vehicle safety and often the diagnostic port is covered by trim that needs to be removed to gain access to the plug negating a longer term connection as it simply doesn't look good with bits of trim missing and cables all over the car - Mike

Garmin's new Ecoroute HD functionality does offer a bit more than what you may think. One of the biggies is that it can report on problems with various drivetrain, emissions, and charging system components, and it can be used to reset trouble codes. And Darren, it is wireless as far as I know. Uses bluetooth to transmit from the plug in dongle to your nuvi.

Garmin 1695 / 255 / 760 w/MSN - Droid w/Google nav + Navigon - Navigon 8100T - Dakota10 - GPSMap76C - GeoMate Jr.

I did confirm, and the dongle is wireless.

I also found a pretty nice explanation of EcoRoute HD:
Here

Garmin 1695 / 255 / 760 w/MSN - Droid w/Google nav + Navigon - Navigon 8100T - Dakota10 - GPSMap76C - GeoMate Jr.

Thanks, that's much better! If it can access any of the standard OBDII and CanBus data points then it would be very attractive to me. Being able to monitor functions such as Traction Battery charge and RPM is a useful aid to extracting the best possible fuel consumption from a Prius and the reason I use a Scangauge now.

Excellent as the Scangauge is, a large colour screen with proper dials to relay the info is much better but I fear this will be rather limited in ecoRoute. We shall see.

Darren Griffin

We did an interview with Garmin about the OBD-II so watch this space (ahem).

Lutz

Report Map Errors here:
TomTom/TeleAtlas NAVTEQ

I hope they disable some of the displays whilst moving. Things like "scores" for today would otherwise be a needless distraction from safer driving. Satnav makers should recognise their responsibility to avoid creating further distractions. Not sure why anyone would want a rev counter on their satnav. Are their many cars without rev counters now? Intake temperature? There must be a huge market for that kind of info.

Does anyone else feel like the satnav companies have rather lost their way? Feels a bit like Microsoft now - they keep adding feature after feature whilst basic stuff still doesn't work properly. In the case of satnav it's the data where effort is required. I appreciate they are different companies but Garmin, Tom Tom et al should be doing more with teh data providers to fix core data quality issues and not inventing toys.

Stuart