However, for another five pounds drivers can have the latest update plus four further updates over the course of one year. TomTom charges £34.95 for a single update and UK maps.

Updating maps for an old sat navīecause of this, Garmin and TomTom offer a one-off map update. Garmin charges £49.99 for Europe-wide maps, which may well influence drivers’ thinking on whether it’s worth updating a sat nav unit or installing a dedicated navigation app on their smartphone. But any longer and the chances are it will become seriously annoying. You can probably get away with this for a handful of years. It means your sat nav may be unable to provide accurate directions or suggest the nearest place to fill the car with fuel. Or a new motorway services, garage or technology park could have been built after the map was released. Safety cameras may have sprung up like weeds. The local speed limits might have changed. That means newly built roads, such as bypasses and dual carriageways, could be missing from the unit’s maps. And as they age, so the maps fall behind the pace of infrastructure development. However, there are still millions in circulation on UK roads. Retailer John Lewis no longer sells them and the finger of blame for their decline in popularity is pointed firmly at the smartphone. Sales of portable units have been in steady decline over the past six years. Whether you update the maps for a portable sat nav largely depends on the age of its existing maps, how much you depend on it and how annoying it is becoming when in use. Here’s how to do it and what you can expect to pay. Happily, it is possible to update the maps of dedicated navigation units. Whichever drivers use, it can be annoying, time wasting and even dangerous if mapping is out of date and sends you down closed or unsuitable roads. Since the rise of the smartphone, more motorists now choose to use free apps, such as maps from Apple, Bing or Google, or pay for dedicated navigation apps. But millions of drivers still rely on them to get from A to B in Britain and further afield. Portable sat nav units may no longer be the big-selling gadgets they were back in the noughties. Updating maps on a sat nav is straightforward

Free tomtom updates 2018