Neverlost
January 7, 2007 – 4:40 pmWhen we were in California for the OC Marathon, we decided it would be easier to rent a car then borrow my wife’s sisters car. We rented a Toyota Highlander, which is kind of a cross between a SUV and a minivan, from Hertz, since my wife travels quite a bit for work, and has a gold membership with them.
One of the nicest features of the car was the Hertz Neverlost GPS navigation system. I’ve used several GPS based navigation systems for phones before such as the map program provided by Handmark on my Sprint phone. The nice thing about the phone based navigation systems is that you can get up to date information in real time, and almost always have you phone with you.
The Neverlost system was the highlight of the driving part of trip. Our 1/2 marathon and hotel was in Irvine, and we made a trip up to LA to visit some friends. So in between San Diego, Irvine, and LA, we put a few miles on the car.
Forget maps. To get where we were going, we just typed in the address using a combination of menus, which was pretty straight forward to use, and we were on our way.
After our visit with our friends in LA, we were on our way back to Irvine for the night and to grab dinner along the way. Our friend gave us the name of a great little Italian restaurant in Manhattan Beach on our route called Mama D’s, but outside of the name and city, didn’t have any info. After a quick scan through the restaurant category in the GPS directory with no luck, I looked up the address on my phone (which I could have just as easily looked it up using a free directory service from a company like Free411.com). Punched the info in the Neverlost system, and we were on our way. Another great feature of the device was that it would recalculate directions if we got off the recommended path, which happened several times for a variety of reasons, including traffic, road closings, and just plain mistakes.
We probably used the system 50 times over the 4 days on our trip around the San Diego area.
