TomTom lose Renault exclusivity

[Darren]

News that TomTom has lost its status as the exclusive supplier of in-dash satnav solutions for Renault resulted in a 4.7% fall in the share price when the markets closed on Friday.

Renault was seen as an important customer for the Dutch satnav manufacturer and it had, until now, enjoyed exclusivity in the supply of in-dash navigation solutions to Renault.

Renault will now be offering versions of the Clio with a low-cost navigation solution from an as yet unspecified competitor. Renault also confirmed that this low-cost option will become available on other models in due course.

With PND sales in steep decline, TomTom and Garmin are focussing on deals in the automotive sectors and this news will come as a blow to their plans.

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Darren Griffin

[Guivre46]

The proverbial race to the bottom?
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Mike R [aka Wyvern46]
Go 530T - unsupported
Go550 Live [not renewed]
Kia In-dash Tomtom

[cjay2412]

tomtom have treated there built in customers as second class since day 1 loads of new features added to pnd over the last couple of years never given to built in units namely

French danger zones
Map share corrections
Ability to add community content voices map colours etc.
Twitter trip advisor
Speed cameras downloaded over the air
Navcore upgrades

All the above are only require a software update but none have been implemented I have come to the conclusion that coming soon means never for built in units.
hopefully we might get some of the long overdue updates if tomtom beleve there business model is under threat

[DennisN]

If French danger zones are as (IN)accurate as TomTom speed cameras in UK, I wouldn't want anything to do with them.

TT Home tells me my Carminat map is not up to date and urges me to join MapShare and download all the lovely corrections. No thank you!!

Speed cameras downloaded over the air? Would that possibly make them even slightly accurate. No thanks!!

For me, one of the worst omissions from the built in Carminat is the ability to "Operate my Carminat" in TomTom Home (Having said which, retaining Home as opposed to My TomTom is a plus!! Now there's a thought - TT Home a plus ).

Does anybody buy a vehicle for the satnav model it uses? But I certainly wouldn't have paid the Renault list price to have Carminat installed (it came as standard in the model I specced, but I didn't spec satnav at several hundred pounds more than my GO model).

Existing customers getting upgrades and updates? Don't hold your breath. Your first sentence about TT treating us as second class has some merit, but to be honest I think TT has lost the plot with all its models - they've been dumbing down and adding irrelevancies for the last five years.
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Dennis

If it tastes good - it's fattening.

Two of them are obesiting!!

[helping]

Last year I had a new Clio from Renault Eurodrive that had a LG GPS. It had a touch screen with a QWERTY keyboard. It was 'different' from the previous years TomTom Carminat and frankly better.

[DennisN]

Gosh, I had long forgotten about this thread.

As an update of sorts, last August I took delivery of my new Renault Kangoo van, replacement for my previous Kangoo. The previous one had TomTom Carminat satnav, an RDS-TMC version which meant I had to have GO550 Live in order to get the decent traffic as opposed to (my opinion) very poor TMC.

The new van came with Renault's new system, R-Link. An all singing, all dancing Multi Media thing (Twitter, email, which you can only use when parked with your iPhone/Smartphone too inaccessible in your pocket!) complete with TomTom Live satnav, an £800+ option (I didn't specify the R-Link, all the other options which I wanted were included in this van with some extras all for the same price, so I chose this model of van). What a disaster! First, it had been delayed waiting for the R-Link thing to be sorted out - I ordered it in February, delivered August. Then it didn't work properly. The van is now 8 months old and has just come back to me after its latest visit, being five weeks in the dealer's to sort out the R-Link system (I did over 6,000 miles in the courtesy van). It went in with a list of 7 faults on the satnav plus two others in the system, and has come back with ONE satnav and one 'other' resolved. The resolved satnav fault was the LMG, Latest Map Guarantee, which had never been applied - the van came with map v905, the dealer in error 'updated' it to v900 - the resolution of this (because LMG never worked for automatic download) was the dealership bought and installed the latest map, v925. The 'other' item resolved was the bluetooth link to my phone worked when it came back.

Small examples of the outstanding faults are - the trip computer shows my fuel consumption as average 53 litres per 100km (or about 1 mile per litre, or perhaps a quarter of a mile per gallon) - the dealer's (written) report on this fault is "Normal for vehicle. No solution at present". The satnav won't navigate to a house number over 100, it loses satellite lock easily and wanders off motorways at junctions, or stays on motorways when I drive off down the slip roads and HD Traffic won't connect to their server. The upshot of it is that I run two other TomTom PNDs on the dashboard because the built in thing is so unreliable.

The icing on the cake is that the thing is supported only by Renault. Anybody who thinks TomTom support is deficient would think they were in heaven by comparison. Only last week they were telling me that my map v905 is the latest available, they argued and argued - "Yes it is, No it isn't, Yes it is" and were greatly surprised when I told them to look on their own website which offered to sell me v925 for £55 (the usual built in rip off for UK&ROI map).
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Dennis

If it tastes good - it's fattening.

Two of them are obesiting!!

[Oldboy]

[DennisN]

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