Product Review - Navman MY Escape

What you really want to avoid!

Towing a boat can be a pain at the best of times, but as you know, when you’re not exactly sure where you’re going or are not familiar with the roads, it’s even worse. A new product from Navman called Navman MY Escape is going to make things a lot easier for Aussie fishermen who tow a boat, caravan or Trailer.

The MY Escape by Navman is pre-loaded with Lonely Planet Travel Guides and 25 Lonely Planet Scenic Routes and 4WD tracks as well as over 8,000 extra points of interest such as camping and fishing sites, but that’s not really the big selling point for us – what really makes this Navman GPS so useful for those of us towing boats is the “Large Vehicle Assist” which gives specialised information for larger vehicles like trucks, 4WDs, or vehicles towing boats, caravans or trailers.

Navman MY Escape great for boaties

In addition, there are other new premium safety features which warn of lane merges or unexpected sharp turns and driver fatigue warning will remind drivers to take a break when driving continuously for more than two hours and drivers can also avoid frustrating traffic jams. The Navman MY Escape GPS also comes with free LIVE SUNA Traffic Updates while school zone warnings, speed limit information and speed and red light camera warnings can help to keep you safer on the roads while towing your boat.

We road-tested the Navman MY Escape in a number of scenarios over the Summer and overall we found it a robust and very useful piece of equipment. The large screen is easy to read in all conditions, and the big buttons make it easy to navigate. We particularly liked the feature which “shaded out” letters where they didn’t exist in any of the possible city and street names. E.g. if you typed “C” then “Q” was shaded out as no cities have names that start with “CQ”. This made it a lot easier to hit the correct letters, a big problem for many fat fingered fishermen!

Certainly when towing the boat on the highway, the “Large Vehicle Assist” was a huge benefit, ensuring that we always avoided problems including little annoyances like having to deal with incoming/merging traffic.

We only have two small complaints about the Navman My Escape, the first was the responsiveness of the touch screen, which is a little slow when you compare it to other makes we’ve used and positively glacial if you compare it to your smart phone. The other thing was that it was occasionally inaccurate with speed-zones, in particular often calling “school zone” when there was a school nearby e.g. beside the highway, even though we weren’t actually in the school zone itself. It is hoped that this later problem is fixed in subsiquent map updates.

With a RRP of $599 the Navman MY Escape is not cheap, but if you tow a boat, caravan or trailer, we think you will find the additional features make this a GPS you really should consider.

For more information visit NAVMAN official website.