Car navigation systems owned by majority of Japanese drivers

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How often do you use your car navigation system? graph of japanese statisticsRecently japan.internet.com reported on a survey conducted by Marsh Inc into car (satellite) navigation systems.

Demographics

Between the 11th and 14th of March 2010 300 driving license-holding car owners completed a private internet-baed questionnaire. 50.0% of the sample were female, 20.0% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, 20.0% in their fifties, and 20.0% aged sixty or older.

In the west I have been getting the impression recently that dedicated car navigation devices are being pushed out by smartphones with often free navigation software. However, in Japan the market is quite well-established with large-screen feature-filled system the norm, so perhaps smartphones will have less of an impact here. That would be an interesting aspect to perform a survey on.

The report does note that compared to just seven months ago (September 2009), the share of owners has gone up by five percentage points.
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GPS mobile phones reach almost half the Japanese

How often do you use your mobile phone's GPS feature? graph of japanese statisticsAnother mobile phone technology nearing the 50% barrier is GPS, Global Positioning System, according to this survey from goo Research and reported on by japan.internet.com looking into GPS. Two days ago we saw that contactless IC chip-based electronic money had passed the 50% mark, and another article I read today about One Seg digital terrestrial television for mobile devices had also passed this milestone. (The original Japanese source is here)

Demographics

Between the 16th to 23rd of September 2008 1,056 members of the goo Research monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 60.8% of the sample were male (7 or so points higher than usual, but no explanation is given why), 12.9% were in their teens, 20.7% in their twenties, 20.2% in their thirties, 22.1% in their forties, and 24.2% aged fifty or older.

I’ve never used a GPS in a portable device, but I couldn’t drive without my car navi system. I rented a Prius last month but whatever default settings they had were a bit wonky, wanting me to detour just a little too far just so I could stick to motorways. I did manage to confuse it for a bit by missing a motorway entrance and instead cruised along underneath where I should have been, but it did recover effortlessly, and I made all my destinations with the minimum of drama.

The latest revision of the Prius navigation and entertainment centre also automatically rips CDs to hard disk and labels them using the Gracenote database, but that’s another story entirely!
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