Car GPS Storage Capacity

[bostonman]

Does a car GPS store all the maps for the entire country or does it get additional information from satellites?

I think a DVD is all that’s needed to update the GPS to a current revision, so that means 4.7GB, but I find it hard to believe that’s enough space for every street name, directions, speed limits, etc….in the country.

[Psi]

The GPS satellite only provide your position, no map data.
In some devices it may get map data over 4G/GPRS cell connection, if the device supports that.
Or it may come with some built in map storage.

For car GPS systems it's either on a DVD located somewhere in the car (old tech), or on a flash drive either built-in or usb.
Some cars automatically refresh the map data on the flash drive over a cell connection depending on where you are.

For cars with a map DVDs they usually only cover the country the car was sold in.
Lots of imported cars have GPS navigation systems that are useless unless you fork out a few hundred $ for a new DVD from the car manufacturer.

4.7GB is plenty of map data for an entire country.  It's not stored as pictures, it's all vector based and lists of street names/locations etc..
Most people know around 20,000 English words, the average word length is 5 char so around 100,000 bytes to store every one.
So in 4.7GB there is enough space to store every word you know 47,000 times over !
And that is assuming no compression is used and text compresses very well.

Images/Audio/Video take up a huge amount of space, text and general information takes up practically nothing in comparison.

Also, keep in mind a normal DVD is 4.7GB but there are other types.
Dual layer DVDs are 9.4GB and can be read in normal DVD players.

[coromonadalix]

i would say yes  with a slightly no  loll

i play with some garmin maps  CNNT,  now some country like canada only are bigger than 2 gigs in some cases ..
canada and usa  and mexico  can be bigger than a few gigs ...

But may thing come with the map

3d buildings / roads etc ...
junction views etc ...
sqlite
sid files ... and theses can be very big  1-2 gigs pretty easily
poi files

and many more stuff, not just the map .... screen size, play a role too ...

i have 8 gigs of storage space in my garmin suzuki car radio,  6gigs  are already taken ...

Garmin as the possibility to select what you want to generate as a map, a town, a country etc ...  the final size will change a lot once compiled

[Psi]

The audio files for turn-by-turn navigation take up some space I guess.
Especially if there are many voice options and multiple languages.

They just spec the GPS system to fit in the amount of space available.
But this is really a moot point on newer cars which have flash memory and are not limited to a DVD size.

[inse]

A CDROM had been sufficient to store the map data for a country like Germany.
So a DVD should provide ample capacity unless wasted by add-on features.

[kripton2035]

on my 2010 bmw 3rd serie, the car gps has a 80GB hard drive to store the datas (gps maps + music).
and the update needs some 20-25GB of data, this is "only" for the half-west of europe map.
today the update are made other-the-air using internet directly from the car.

[DavidKo]

One of the scenarios is that you will not be able to get GPS maps update if the maps generated by car manufacturer and he does not longer support it.

For example Renault Megane (do no know the year) had the Europe on 5 CDs and correct one need to be loaded while traveling to different Europe part.

There is no answer for your question since you have not specified the car/gps used. It can have the few states, whole country, whole continent or a whole world (does not make too much sense).

[Psi]

Also really old GPS systems may not work correctly any more.
If your car GPS is old enough to have map data on a DVD the GPS receiver maybe so old that it just doesn't work on the modern GPS satellite network.

Anything using ICD-200 or IS-GPS-200 spec stopped working or started behaving strangely in 2019 when they tuned off some old GPS tech.  I think it was something similar to y2k where the year bits rolled over.

[BradC]

One of the scenarios is that you will not be able to get GPS maps update if the maps generated by car manufacturer and he does not longer support it.

That's my problem. The last map update DVD for my car was 2012. I use carplay now and let the phone work it out.

[james_s]

This is exactly why I hate these hardwired infotainment systems. When you use a standalone GPS navigator or smartphone you can upgrade it any time you want. These built in systems become obsolete eventually and updates stop. They're usually so tightly integrated that it's difficult to replace with something else.

[kripton2035]

I had one of the first integrated gps in a bmw car in 2000. the maps at the time were very ... light in datas !
there has been huge work in the years 2000-2005 in the filling of the maps datas.
and frankly, not so much after that.
I update my car once every 2-3 years and there is not much changes each time you can notice.

In 2000, a friend bought a porsche cayenne, also one of the first with integrated gps. he had NO map update for years.
I had an update twice a year . and my 2010 bmw still has maps updates ...

[SeanB]

Well the Garmin GPS I got for free has a SD card slot, and I put in a SD card of 8G (smallest one I had in micro SD format, so in it went), and the updated full topographic maps for the entire Africa south of the equator only take up a little under 4G of it. Then added in a few extra free voices, and a few extra vehicles, which all in all came to under 50M of added space used. Garmin wants to charge for the maps, but OpenGPS has them for free, and at least they do occasionally update them, plus you do not need to install the adware and spyware they also add as cruft in the map downloader. Yes fired up Transmission to download the torrent, and killed it as soon as it was done. Even updated a few other GPS units as well, because they also had outdated 2002 maps in them, and the maps do work with the older GPS units, though I did choose the non topographic maps for the less capable older ones, as they crash with doing the full topo maps, especially in dense areas.

Car GPS some can be updated, though some require a dealer tool to do so, meaning you have to first find a dealer with the tool, and pay them the free for the update, which for older vehicles can be a big issue.

[bostonman]

Maybe yearly I get a notice about paying somewhere around $129.99 to update the maps.

I don't see the sense in it, and they could possibly be maps from months or maybe a year earlier. Any construction going on (i.e. detours) would probably be part of that package.