世論 What Japan Thinks

I’d be lost without car navigation, as it were, and the devices they put in as standard in all Toyota rent-a-cars are pretty darned good, although I occassionally get one with a slightly out of date map that misses out a new bypass or two. To find out what the average Japanese person thinks, MyVoice performed its third survey on car navigation usage.

Demographics

Over the first five days of December 2007 14,643 members of the MyVoice internet community completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 54% of the sample was female, 2% in their teens, 16% in their twenties, 39% in their thirties, 28% in their forties, and 15% in their fifties.

When I hired a car last year in Austria it came with a Hertz NeverLost device, but I couldn’t for the life of me get it to work, and having only a German instruction manual didn’t help in the slightest. It seemed to be little more than a GPS to me, with no route planning functionality whatsoever, and if I’d actually paid to rent the device I’d have asked for my money back after having been spoilt by the Japanese devices. I managed eventually to find my way thanks to a Google Maps printout, though.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of research by Cross Marketing Inc into car navigation systems. As usual for Cross Marketing, the demographics of the 320 car drivers that completed the internet-based survey were exactly 50.0% of each sex and 25.0% of each age group from twenties to fifties. One thing not made clear in the results is whether or not the people interviewed drove the car for work or leisure, and whether the car was privately owned or a company car.

Car navigation is a wonderful thing, especially in Japan with its rather quirky way of designating addresses and a bit of a dearth of road signs. One minus point is that given the rate that new roads are built, even just a one year old map data set can be out-of-date. For instance, just about every time I have rented a car and gone any significant distance I’ve ended up on a bit of road not on the car navi’s map. Conversely, last time I drove, thanks to the car navi we found a road through the hill at the back of our house, then another rather fun single-track one round the back of the next hill, saving us getting stuck in a 5 kilometre jam in the process.
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