Porsche 911 Turbo and Porsche Panamera Forum | panameraboard.comFor Porsche owners and the upcomng BMW M5 competitor: the four-door Porsche Panamera. panameraboard.com
Probably Silver or Black, but there is a nice (Lapis) Blue with light gray interior (Has bling/bling chrome wheels on it) What do you guys think looks best?
Also, is the Nav worth it, or get an Aftermarket Nav system installed? Thanks for any thoughts.
Boy the M5 seems big/heavy after driving these............
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CaptainCurtis the Flying Elvis:
Brand New Porsche 996TT (500 miles)
2001 Silverstone/Silverstone/Sport
Brand New Range Rover Spec. Ed. with 22" Bling Blings for Fun
Ordering Either new M5 or M6
I personally think that black, silver or red are the three colors that you cannot go wrong on. I am not so sure about the blue and would stay away from the chrome wheels. I think that going aftermarket is the way to go with navigation, you will get a better system for the money. Companys such as Kenwood make very nice products that are a flip out headunit with navigation, mp3 and a power source for your stereo. If you go this route I would suggest upgrading your speakers also, to take advantage of the headunit. You could also buy a portable navigation unit, these units range from 150-500 dollars but can get even more expensive. In thirty minutes you could hardwire the unit into your car like a radar detector and it would work great!!
Unless the PCM unit with Nav that porsche provides is far inferior than that provided with BMW's 540/M5, I would never get an after market unit or portable for one single reason -
Built in wheel sensors designed to alleviate SA induced phasing of your calculated position. SA distortion is of course no longer routinely done ever since they signed the new law a couple years ago to stop the scrambling of non-military GPS units.
However, even without that, a single attenna GPS unit can be off by +/- 30 meters or so even for one considered "very good". You only get accuracy down to inches using industrial grade dual attenna GPS systems that perform trigonometic calculations to confirm your position. So 100 feet as the usual margin for error - if you try using a hand held Garmin unit, you'll see that when you are driving/walking on streets that are very close to each other in parallel, your position will phase back and forth sometimes from one street to the other.
With automotive GPS systems like BMW, I was told there was integration with wheel sensors so that the software would conclude despite a sudden shift in calculated position based on the GPS signal, that there was no way the vehicle could have just shifted horizontally by 100 feet. So as far as the map displayed to you, your calculated position is shown very steady.
Whether this is true or not I don't know, but it sure seems to make sense because despite the crazy nav routes our BMW systems sometimes shows, the displayed calculated position always stays steady, and I know for a fact that without some software extrapolation based on positional sensors, any hand held GPS unit will from time to time show you warping from one street to the other.
Will it be a new car? If so they've improved the PCM to PCM2 now. If what I've seen is right it now has a larger wide screen display, and they've imprved a few of the controls and menus.
I had PCM on a 2002 C4 and one thing I didn't like was the small screen and tha fact the phone needed a SIM inserted in a credit card size adapter, not sure if this has been addressed with PCM2. I also highly recommend the BOSE speakers, not sure if their standard on the TT.
Benifits of an aftermarket system would be the use of DVD, so more data is available and the access times are faster.
But whatever you decide I know you're going to have loads of fun with the TT...
Congradulations on the 996tt, you will love it. Regarding the navagation, i would try to stick with factory options as much as possible as it helps resale and will integrate into the car much better then an aftermarket unit. Forgo the chrome wheels and look at some silver rims. The 996tt looks great in a wide variety of rims (HRE, Champion, Hamann, Techart, etc). Please let us know how you make out and please post some pictures !
Jacob Lee- I had a hard time following your post but I gathered that you were saying portable units or aftermarket ones are not accurate inside of a car. Although I am not sure if the type of car would vary the results I know atleast two people who use them inside their car (both Toyota's) and it does VERY well.
greg- Are you going to buy another TT after you sell your black one? That is what I gathered from your post.
Originally posted by M5Kid Jacob Lee- I had a hard time following your post but I gathered that you were saying portable units or aftermarket ones are not accurate inside of a car. Although I am not sure if the type of car would vary the results I know atleast two people who use them inside their car (both Toyota's) and it does VERY well.
greg- Are you going to buy another TT after you sell your black one? That is what I gathered from your post.
-Travis
Not at all. I did not say portable or aftermarket GPS units are not accurate inside of a car. That is a rather blanket statement meaningless without some context. Nor did I say or imply a portable or aftermarket unit can't be better than a car manufacturer's built in unit. That too is an open ended statement that can't be qualified without putting some context to what "accurate" is and what specific type of portable or aftermarket GPS unit one is talking about. However, assuming that "accurate" is based on the commonly accepted vernacular of the GPS industry, then yes - what I did say specifically say is that a single attenna unit, which is what most common hand held civilian GPS units are, gets "good" accuracy of about +/- 30 meters for calculated versus actual position.
Given this metric, a single attenna GPS unit, portable or otherwise, will not be "accurate" when travelling in areas where your plotted position is in close proximity to other potential plot positions such that the distance between these two points is less than the +/- accuracy of your unit because of the potential for your displayed position to shift based on signal interpretation from moment to moment. Unless of course that GPS unit has the advantage of "knowing" via input from other vehicle sensors that based on angle of direction, speed, time value between sensor data points and GPS calculated position points that the calculated position based on GPS signals are "wrong".
For example, if at t=0 the calculated position is at x1, y1, z1 coordinates, but at t=1 the calculated position is at x2, y2, z2 coordinates, and the total distance between these two spatial points is now 87 feet, your GPS unit would normally display your calculated position on the map as having moved between these two spatial points over whatever time period that t=0 and t=1 represents. However, if that GPS unit has the advantage of vehicle sensors that report that over the time period t=0 and t=1 the angle of direction (or even better an actual vector) did not deviate in a manner to make that position shift physically possible based on vector calculations, then a well programmed GPS unit would simply display your calculated position as having moved between your old position at t=0 and a new software corrected and extrapolated postion at t=1 based on a "best guess" of your last known position, angle of direction/vector, and time elapsed.
*-at this point, we could also start going into a couple chapters about how signal strength, frequency of sampling to update the GPS unit, # of GPS sattelites your unit sees in the visible horizon, etc., plays a part in just how your GPS unit is programmed to display your position blip against the known map reference, but let's just assume for the purpose of this discussion that both the portable/aftermarket units and manufacturer's installed units have the same coded logic tree.
Your friends in the Toyota with portable GPS units may consider the performance to be "very well". As noted above and repeating what I said earlier, in general GPS devices context, a civilian unit with only a single attenna is considered "good" if the +/- accuracy of actual versus plotted position is roughly 30 meters or less based on hardware capability (e.g. assuming the GPS signals are received from at least 3 orbitting GPS satellites without their signals deliberately scrambled or distorted as in the recent past when only military receivers received the "true" signal). So for your friends this might really be considered "very well" and in fact may actually out perform some auto manufacturer's built in GPS units if those built in units have a +/- accuracy far worse than your friends portables, or if the +/- is only slightly worse but the vehicle can not make up for that by software extrapolation from wheel and othe sensor data.
However, if your friends have a "really good" portable GPS unit with dual attennas, the usual +/- accuracy of one of these can be down to 5-10 meters depending on the distance between the two attennas. If your friends have one of these, then yes, even the usual auto manufacturer's built in units with wheel sensor integration would be hard pressed to match it, or only equal to it based on software correction, not actual raw capability of determining calculated versus actual positions.
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