Have you fallen out of love with the standalone sat nav and rely instead on a phone app or a built-in system to get around? The answer seems to be yes, judging by an annual look at what shoppers typically buy.
Each year the Office for National Statistics makes up a virtual shopping basket that it uses to calculate consumer price inflation (CPI).
This year’s shopping list has 703 items including, for the first time, sweet potatoes, e-cigarettes, craft beer and protein powder.
But apparently frozen pizzas and yoghurt drinks no longer have a place in your hearts – or rather your basket. And neither it seems does the standalone sat nav. The ONS says that sat navs were removed partly due to people using smartphone apps, but also because so many new cars have built-in sat nav units. But is that right?
Sat nav: standalone or all alone?
So have you removed the sat nav’s rubber sucker from your car for the last time? Well, perhaps not. Our recent survey found that standalone sat navs are still popular with Which? members.
When we asked more than 1,300 Which? members, 49% owned a standalone sat nav. Far ahead of the 30% that have a smartphone app and 28% with a built-in system.
My Waze or the highway
I’ve just joined the Which? cars team and now find myself hopping in and out of different cars all the time. So it was a question of which of the three options to use. On my first trip into Which? HQ in London, I trusted the built-in sat nav (that didn’t have live traffic) to take me to work.
The result? Inching through East Croydon at rush hour, crawling past the Houses of Parliament and up Oxford Street at an achingly glacial pace. Journey taking an hour longer than usual.
I admit it, the next thing I tried wasn’t the standalone, but an app called Waze – it gave me several en-route amendments to miss traffic and it cut loads of time off the journey.
Having a sat nav on my phone suits me because I don’t need to carry round extra kit (other than the small holder I use to attach my phone to the air vent in different cars).
So which are you using: standalone, smartphones or a built-in sat nav?
What type of sat nav do you use?
Standalone sat nav (42%, 442 Votes)
What’s wrong with a normal map? (24%, 250 Votes)
Built-in sat nav (18%, 194 Votes)
Smartphone app (16%, 167 Votes)
Total Voters: 1,053
