Why you should not rent a GPS Vehicle Navigator unit for your Italian car rental.

What nonsense.

Yes, there was a specific catastrophe that impacts crossing this one location. To state that nobody should use a GPS in Italy because of that is...well, I'll leave that to others to characterize.

Technology is not magic. It requires the user to understand how it works, its limitations, and most of all, it requires the operator to still use their head, rather than just switch off one's brain and blindly follow whatever the gizmo tells you. Anyone paying attention should know about this very well publicized single road failure that has impacted so many people. It's an inconvenience, yes, but I think you're making way too much of it. Enjoy your time in Italy.

Mike,

The problem with a dedicated GPS unit is that the maps don't always update automatically. If you were to download the newest maps for your GPS unit, they may include a change in routing to accommodate the Morandi bridge closure. In my experience, Google Maps is a more reliable "real time" indicator of current road conditions. I'm sure Google has a team of people at work every day adding revisions to their database.

You might want to alter your thread title to reflect what was said by David. If you hadn't had to traverse thru Genoa, no doubt your opinion of onboard GPS would have been quite different. By the same token, a paper map wouldn't have been any different in this case.

We recently travelled along a brand new stretch of highway that didn't show on our GPS, even though we have the most recent maps. We handled it. Doesn't mean I think our GPS unit isn't worthwhile 99% of the time.

Mike, I think you make a great point about using a stand-alone GPS vs. a phone system like Google Maps: you do get not just maps but routings based on real-time traffic (if you have data on your phone). Google Maps for example doesn't need to know a bridge collapsed or not; it just knows that cars aren't moving over it anymore so will guide you to a faster route around it.

I certainly wouldn't pay extra for an on-board GPS anymore, given how well my phone works and how cheap they are these days.

No matter whether it's Google or rented with the car, we just imagine the GPS people sitting in a room laughing "look, I'm going to send this guy into somebody's back yard!"

Thank you Andrew H., that is my point. If it's not a bridge collapse, it's a pop-up road construction, so map updates are irrelevant. Yet, renters assume paying for an in-car GPS will take care of their needs.

Road construction comes up on my built in GPS / Sat Nav wherever I am in Europe. Just have to have the traffic function switched on and correctly configured. It is a Garmin in a Honda Civic. The maps don't self-update without some action on my part, but the traffic updates by the minute.

We have a GPS with a Europe map but left it home for this trip and are using my iPhone. I bought a SIM card at TIM for 25€. It works better than the old GPS.

This applies anywhere. I have a built in GPS in my car. I didn't want it, but it came equipped that way. Even so, if I need GPS I almost always use my iPhone and Google maps or Waze. I've used my phone and Google maps in Europe several times with great success. Not everyone can do that, so in those cases using the GPS in the car is better than nothing. Either method requires one to use their head, not blindly follow the GPS.

I actually rented a car from Hertz with built in GPS for our trip to Tuscany. Hertz touts their NeverLost system with the ability to create your own saved places and have them download to the unit in your rental car. It turns out that NeverLost only works in the US. I canceled the NeverLost rental and for not much more than it would cost to rent, I bought a new Garmin to replace our obsolete model, plus the SD card with maps of Italy and Greece.

The Garmin worked great. Before we left on our trip, I programmed several of the places we were going, including our Agriturismo. When we picked up our car at the Rome FCO, I mounted it on the windshield, changed the settings to metric and pulled up the saved address for our Tuscan agriturismo. The Garmin took us straight there. It even displayed speed limits along the way.

We found using a combination of the Garmin and a good Michelin paper map worked best. We had no problems finding our way, even late at night when we were tired and in an unfamiliar area. A few times we also used our iPhone for a different view, but the Garmin was more than sufficient.

GPS and Google maps offline worked spectacularly for me in Sicily last month. Since its rural roads are so poorly marked, I had to depend on GPS.