The joy of riding a motorcycle is to take the road less travelled, to go off the beaten path. It is about avoiding the infrastructure put in by traffic engineers with the sole aim of transporting people from A to B with as little contact as possible with the intervening space.
No wonder, then, that I am utterly obsessed with finding the ideal navigation solution for riding my motorcycle. An objective which I have so far completely failed to achieve.
What I want is a navigation system that will take me down fun and interesting roads, to inspiring and delightful destinations, avoiding as much of the drabber side of civilisation as possible. Charming villages and towns with surprisingly good and affordable eateries are more than welcome. Vast suburban estates filled with little boxes made of ticky-tacky and the eighteen-lane motorways which connect them are to be avoided at all costs.
I have been using some form of GPS navigation for nearly two decades. Starting with an HP iPAQ in a ziplock plastic bag to prevent the ingress of water, via a Garmin GPSMap 276C, a Garmin Zumo 220, and a TomTom Rider 550, but now I find myself at a crossroads.
Navigation solutions have vastly improved over the years, and yet each advance still leaves me feeling frustrated. I can’t help but feel that something is missing, so much more could be possible. That, I suppose, is the Catch 22 of technological progress: it opens doors to vistas you didn’t know were there, and that allows you to imagine how it could be even better. You get given the moon on a stick, and the first thing you notice is how poorly designed the stick is.
It all started with the arrival of my BMW GSA, and its Multi-Controller scroll wheel, or wonderwheel to give it its more commonly used nickname. As I have written before, the wonderwheel solves one of the biggest problems with modern GPS-based navigation. The GPS will tell you exactly where you are, but a lot of the time, you have no idea where that is. You have a precise location, but you lack the wider context in which to place that location.
Your GPS may tell you that you are currently riding along High Street, and need to turn right in 350 metres. But it isn’t telling you that the High Street you are riding on is in Birmingham or Blairgowrie, Woonona or Wolverhampton.
Context reinstated
The wonderwheel allows you to zoom out on the map while on the move. You can quickly get a bigger picture of where your route is taking you without having to pull over to the side of the road and zoom in or out manually.
This is particularly useful when you are not following a specific route, but just following your fancy. If you spot a road which you like the look of, you can head down it and quickly zoom in or out on the moving map to see if it’s a dead end, if it is taking you to a spectacular vista or a grim industrial estate.
I realise, of course, that this falls into the category of First World Problems, like not having the correct type of organic quinoa at your local supermarket. And yet it is precisely those kind of problems that can drive a person very quietly insane.
When I bought my GSA, I plumped for a BMW Navigator VI to go with it. Not a new one, obviously. The Nav VI is basically a vastly overpriced seven-year-old Garmin Zumo, built especially for BMW with a few added options, and definitely not worth the €800 or so BMW are asking for it. So I snagged a (very) secondhand one off a forum a quarter of the price of a new one.
It was useful to play with, and get a feel for how the Navigator and the wonderwheel interact. I was using it as a moving map and info display device (the Navigator can display a host of customisable information from the bike, such as fuel range, fuel consumption, trip info, tyre pressures, engine temperature, etc) while I continued to use my TomTom Rider 550 to actually navigate.
That was a messy business, however. Apart from the obvious clutter it caused, having two large GPS devices in the cockpit, it still didn’t achieve what I was after. Though I could zoom in on the map on the Navigator VI, I couldn’t check where the route was going to take me without stopping and zooming in on the TomTom Rider 550.
While playing with the Navigator VI, I also ran into a common complaint with the device, the so-called “ghosting” or “ghost touch”. What happens is your screen suddenly switches, or scrolls, or zooms in and out at high speed, as if someone had taken control of the device. It is a common enough complaint that Garmin will replace the devices with no questions asked. Scroll through any BMW motorcycle forum, and you will come across a litany of complaints, with it being common for Navigator VI owners to be on their third or fourth swapped device.
I followed the rumours of a BMW Navigator VII, but despite the occasional rumour of its release being imminent, it has mostly proved to be vapourware. With the introduction of the BMW Connected Cradle and more significantly, the on-screen navigation on the massive TFT dash of the BMW R1250RT, the chances of a Navigator VII being released seem vanishingly small.
Fortunately, there is a (much cheaper) alternative to the BMW Navigator. A group of engineers in the US formed a company called Black Box Embedded to build a device which they named the WunderLINQ, which attaches to the BMW navigation cradle and transmits the data it receives to an app running on a phone connected via Bluetooth.
The WunderLINQ app displays the same info page as on the BMW Navigator VI, but it also allows the wonderwheel to be used to control your phone. You can scroll through a series of apps, access your phone’s home screen, operate your GoPro, control a music player, or open your favourite mobile navigation app. More importantly, for my purposes, you can zoom in and out in navigation apps which have implemented an integration with the device and app. I bought a second-hand WunderLINQ and a second-hand Ulefone Armor 7 at knockdown prices and fitted it to the bike.
This solves your original problem, I hear you say. It does. I can now zoom in and out on an active route, see where I am going, see what is coming up, and decide whether I want to ignore the planned route because I spotted something more interesting in a different direction.
But here is where I jump out of the First World Problems frying pan and into the World’s Smallest Violin fire. Sure, I can zoom in and out on the map of selected apps. But the apps which have implemented the WunderLINQ integration are, for the most part, open source projects where anyone can contribute, or similar specialist motorcycle navigation apps with strong connections to the open source community. Unsurprising, as the OpenStreetMap project has created a base of mapping material on which developers can build apps.
For an in-depth look at the WunderLINQ hardware and software, head to the Black Box Embedded website.The app documentation is comprehensive and lays out the capabilities of the app fairly clearly.
To clean up the cockpit of my bike, I (eventually) got around to removing the navigation cradle and replacing it with a 3D printed AMPS clamp for the bar which held the navigation cradle, to which I have connected a Quad Lock lever head and AMPS base. (If you aren’t interested in fitting this to a BMW, just skip over this bit and continue reading my thesis on what is wrong with GPS navigation apps.)
Removing the navigation cradle means getting rid of the large plastic cradle designed to hold the BMW Navigator VI unit, but you still need to stow the actual power and data connector somewhere. For me that entailed disassembling the navigation cradle (very simple, basically just the four bolts holding the front section to the rear clamp - put tape over the nuts to ensure you don’t lose them when you unscrew the retaining bolts), and snipping the cable loose from the various cable ties that help route the wires. This also requires you to release the connector (on the right-hand side of the front subframe) so you can reroute the power cable more freely.
I attached the WunderLINQ to the power connector, and slid a section of bicycle inner tube over them to keep them together. I then attached the WunderLINQ and power connector assembly to the left front subframe (there’s a nice space on the left for it) with a couple of cable ties, and a couple of sections of inner tube to act as a damper and protect against vibration.
I routed the power connector cable up over the top of the TFT dash and back down to the special connector socket on the right-hand side, and cable tied everything in place.
That’s the hardware. But what about the software? Does anything live up to my Platonic ideal of a motorcycle navigation system? Not exactly, but to explain why, I first have to set out exactly what such a system would do.
The kind of roads I want to ride on a motorcycle are light in traffic, with interesting curves, or a scenic backdrop, or preferably both. Obviously, living in The Netherlands as I do, that is a big ask. But I’d settle for quiet roads through some of the prettier landscapes. Or just quiet roads.
The roads I want to avoid are motorways, self-evidently. But also long, straight A roads (to use the British parlance: here in The Netherlands they are N roads, each country has its own designation, but I’m sure you know what I mean) are undesirable. Roads with a lot of traffic, especially of the stop-start variety, are unwanted, as are roads with traffic lights or roundabouts every 300 metres. (Voice guidance through sections with roundabouts every 200 metres is the quickest path to going postal.)
I also want to avoid built-up areas as much as possible. Anywhere you can pass through quickly is fine, or towns and villages with charming, surprising, or spectacular architecture are welcome. But crawling through a large city with heavy traffic is no fun, nor is riding through residential areas.
Traffic calming measures such as speed bumps are unwanted for the most part, though it can be fun flicking the bike left and right through the chicanes they sometimes put in to slow cars. Even speed bumps can be fun when hooligan mode is engaged. That, right there, is the difference between a car and a motorcycle.
And of course, I want fair warning of speed cameras. Not because I like to hoon around at six times the speed limit - as a rule, I stay pretty close to the speed limit in most situations - but because often, speed cameras are put in places where roads transition from one speed limit to another, and they are trying to catch you out/ensure you slow down (delete as appropriate) as the limit changes. (I am ignoring for the moment that legislation on GPS devices showing speed cameras varies wildly by country and region. In some places, using a device which warns of speed cameras is illegal.)
More choice please
I also want different modes of route calculation. Apart from the ubiquitous “A to B as quickly as possible” mode, I want to have different options for different types of riding. On long distance journeys, I want to take routes which are scenic and fast. There might be an amazingly twisty mountain road, or a fun little country lane, but I don’t want to spend two hours covering 60km.
Those roads are the type I might seek out on leisure rides, either locally or when I don’t need to get anywhere. Such routes are likely to be circular, returning where I start, rather than passing from A to B. They might also contain a section of gravel or sand, so I can wobble about and scare myself silly pretending I am on some grand adventure, tearing through the Sahara rather than pottering along a farm track by the side of a potato field.
The thing is, a lot of navigation solutions will offer you something along those lines. There’s BMW’s Connected App, for example, which is built around TomTom’s navigation technology. You can choose from four different types of route, which are relatively self-explanatory. Fast (quickest route); Short (shortest route); Efficient (the most fuel-efficient route); and Winding (the scenic/curvy option). Winding also has three levels at which you can set it, depending on how much time you have to spare.
The Connected App will also take account of traffic and reroute you accordingly. But because of the way it uses the TFT display - only taking over the screen when you are approaching a turn - there are no visual clues for traffic density and no warning of speed cameras. For an example of what the screen looks like, check the BMW website, or this brief video from BMW on YouTube.
Traffic density and speed cameras are one of the biggest obstacles you face with apps which are not owned or based on TomTom, Apple Maps, or Google Maps. TomTom buys in phone data from mobile service providers, which they can feed into an algorithm to calculate traffic density. Google, of course, has data from the millions of people using the Google Maps app, and everyone who has location switched on on their phones, as does Apple Maps. Google also has a database of reported speed cameras and temporary speed checks, provided in part by users, and possibly also purchased from third-party speed camera database sellers.
The problem I have is that neither Google Maps nor TomTom’s motorcycle app, GO Ride, will integrate with the WunderLINQ controller. So while I can see traffic and speed cameras, I can’t zoom in or out to see where I am without pulling over. Which puts me right back where I started.
The main objection to Google Maps on a motorcycle is that your options for creating routes are limited. You have the choice of either the fastest route including motorways, or the fastest route avoiding motorways. Or you can manually create a route adding stops on every road you want to ride along.
TomTom is much better in that respect, but it has its own peculiarity. I noticed it especially with the TomTom Rider 550, but I have occasionally seen it with the GO Ride app too. When passing through towns in The Netherlands, the TomTom algorithm wants to route you through certain types of residential estates.
Dutch urban planners do a very good job of breaking up housing estates and laying them out to avoid massive rectangular blocks of houses. What they do instead is stagger groups of houses, shortening sight lines and breaking up streets to give them a friendlier feel.
This is great if you happen to live on one of these new estates, but it is also very good at fooling algorithms looking for curvy roads. The example below (from Almere in Flevoland) shows just how geometrically pleasing such estates can look, and how they tick all of the algorithmic boxes. But as they are usually 50km zones, and often have 30km limits, they are particularly shit to ride.
In my experience, an affinity for residential areas seems to be a recurrent problem with TomTom software. Allowing my TomTom Rider 550 to calculate a route through Luxemburg took me mostly along roads passing through towns. It was the worst of both worlds: as tedious as a motorway route, but without any of the speed.
Kurviger 3
Of the navigation apps I have used, Kurviger has been the best at creating fun routes. That is thanks in part to the incredibly granular level of control you have over the routing parameters.
The top row allows you to select four different routing algorithms: Fastest, Fast and curvy, Curvy, and Extra curvy. The button on the far right will show you all three curvy routes on the same screen, so you can compare the differences in routes and time taken, and make a choice based on that.
The second row allows you to override different road preferences, including ferries, motorways, main roads, narrow roads, and unpaved roads. You can set each preference level individually, either setting the level of avoidance between 1 and 5, or switching the avoidance off altogether.
The good thing about Kurviger 3 is that it also has a web interface. Indeed, the phone app looks like it is a wrapper around the website. The web interface appears to work the same, with some additional functionality for managing your account, but it is much easier to plan a route on a desktop or tablet.
One annoyance is the route planning page of the Kurviger phone app is that it only works in portrait mode. That makes things difficult when the phone is on the bike. When navigating, the map works in both landscape and portrait mode.
The downside to the Kurviger app is that you can’t tailor the navigation interface to the extent you might want to. The current speed field looks pretty but is hard to read. The speed limit of the road you are on is not currently displayed, but this is planned for future releases.
The biggest disadvantage is that Kurviger won’t show you traffic, and it is pretty much impossible to import speed cameras into the app. It does have a rerouting option which will avoid road closures, but this is not quite the same as responding to live traffic conditions.
Cruiser
The current version of Kurviger (Kurviger 3) is really a fork, and quite different from previous versions. As far as I can tell, one of the main developers of the previous versions left the Kurviger project citing a lack of resources. Though I don’t understand the details of the split, it has big “artistic differences” vibes.
What that developer did do, though, is move to work on a project which looks almost identical to the old version of Kurviger, called Cruiser. That app feels very stripped down - the logo is the letter C on a blue background, about as simple as you can get - and it allows both online and offline routing and maps. And here’s where it gets really complicated.
The choice of online and offline maps is great, of course, but the choice of routing engine makes this an app for those who are willing to spend a lot of time and effort exploring the different options, and understanding the differences. Each routing engine has its own set of preferences - some very simple, others a bit more complex - and the offline routing engines require you to download both offline maps and offline routing graphs.
Could this be the solution I am looking for? I don’t have the time to investigate. It is undoubtedly powerful. But it feels very much like the Gentoo Linux of navigation apps, where you are almost building everything from scratch. It is possible to build your own routing graphs and tailor them to your own requirements. That is not something I have the spare time for.
Cruiser does integrate with the WunderLINQ app, and so I can use the wonderwheel to scroll in and out. Creating routes is fairly straightforward, as long as you ignore the complexities of the various options. The interface is relatively clean with a fair amount of information, much of which is customisable. It is possible to import speed cameras and display them as an overlay, but that means you have to enable them each time. Cruiser does not display traffic data, and only takes account of road closures.
OpenStreetMap
Both Cruiser and Kurviger are based around the OpenStreetMap project. The OSMAnd app is the granddaddy of OpenStreetMap navigation apps, and is incredibly powerful, while still relatively simple to use. You have a choice of different profiles, which will display different map styles and use different navigation routing. The choice of standard profiles is huge - cycling, walking, motorcycle, moped, driving, truck, public transport, boat, aircraft, skiing, horseback riding, and a default ‘Browse Map’ option. And of course you can create your own profile.
The display is also configurable, including layers such as petrol stations, restaurants, and yes, even speed cameras. The speed camera database is rather outdated, but it is much easier to import your own POI list with speed cameras and display that. It does not display traffic, of course, and for my purposes, it does integrate with the WunderLINQ controller.
Overall, OSMAnd is an outstanding option for navigation, though again, with some flaws. The routing algorithms are rather weak, with no option to create or prefer curvy roads. You can configure avoidances, but you still tend to end up on the quickest route, rather than the best route.
As with Cruiser, you can configure your own routing engine. The offline options work relatively well, but can take a very long time to calculate routes. The online options will calculate routes faster but are much more limited in scope. Unless, once again, you are willing to dive into the intricacies of, for example, the GraphHopper routing API…
Close, but no cigar
Personally, I find OSMAnd the most frustrating option. It has so much of what I want from a navigation app. The interface has plenty of information, and is extremely powerful. You can download maps (though you will need a subscription to get a useful collection, and they take up a lot of storage space on your phone - I have all of The Netherlands and Belgium, most of Germany, and a bit of Italy on my phone, and it’s over 8GB), not just for roads, but also containing contour lines, hillshade, and more. It has so much potential, but it is missing a really good routing option. Plug the Kurviger algorithm in, and it would be very good indeed.
OSMAnd does have something of a learning curve. You can pick it up and play quite easily, but you need to get your head around several concepts before you know where to look for certain things. Understanding what data is configured in profiles, what you can configure in the configure map option, and what in the configure screen option is important. I find myself going through a lot of the menus each time I try to remember how to do something. A lot is possible, but the more you want to do, the more complicated it is.
For example, choosing Configure Map allows you to display or hide various categories of POIs. Irritatingly, you have to click the hard-to-spot single or multiple selection button on the lower left when selecting which categories to display. You can also hide or display GPX tracks, and confusingly again, you have to travel through this path if you just want to import a GPX track.
Selecting Configure Screen will allow you to choose which panels to display on the map, and what to display there. That includes distance to destination, distance to intermediate, current speed, speed limit, distance, altitude, GPS status, and about 40 other options.
All of these are different and configurable for each profile separately. To modify profiles, you have to go in through Settings.
The path to modifying all of these settings is complex, but it also illustrates just how powerful OSMAnd is as a mapping and navigation app. In combination with just how comprehensive the OSM maps are make it incredibly useful. In The Netherlands, for example, the cycling profile will display the national cycle network nodes and routes, as well as known mountain biking trails. The hiking profile will display hiking node networks.
You can see why I would want to make OSMAnd work for motorcycling. If it had a half-decent routing algorithm, this would be nearly perfect. If it also had live traffic, it would be completely perfect.
Long way round
If OSMAnd is not my perfect solution, there is still a workaround. The web version of Kurviger allows you to plan a route, tweak it, and then export it in a whole range of formats, including GPX, TomTom ITN, Google Earth KML, and many more. I could export a route from Kurviger and import it into OSMAnd. Or indeed, any navigation app or device I decided to switch to.
Kurviger isn’t the only option here, of course. Furkot is another possibility, with the added benefit of being able to plan long distance trips including overnight accommodation and even food stops. I could also use Garmin Basecamp, a rather complex but very powerful desktop planning tool. It does require you own (or have previously owned) a Garmin device so you can download the maps. Anyone with a TomTom device will also be aware of the MyDrive app, which does something similar, though it does not allow you to export the route in other formats.
Having all of the above options is one of the reasons I bought a WunderLINQ. It frees you from the control of BMW and Garmin, giving you a choice of apps you want to use. You can run your navigation app of choice, but also your music player or podcast of choice, and operate them all from the wonderwheel. The WunderLINQ has worked smoothly from the moment I started using it, and of the 12000km and nearly 200 rides I have used it for, it has only hesitated to connect via Bluetooth twice. That proved to be a question of seating the unit more firmly, and it was back again.
The walled garden model
The reason I started on this quest for the perfect navigation app is because the options offered by Garmin and BMW did not fulfil my requirements. But the future for such integrated options is looking increasingly bleak.
More and more motorcycle manufacturers are offering integrated navigation, but unlike car makers, the only integration they are offering is with their own, proprietary apps. Triumph has its own connectivity system built by Google, Ducati has a system built by Sygic, as does KTM, Honda has a system which integrates with Google Maps, and as said, BMW uses a system provided by TomTom.
This closed ecosystem is also why you are not seeing manufacturers implement Apple CarPlay or Android Auto, as just about all of the main car makers do. That is in part because riding a motorcycle is a very different experience to travelling by car, and as I explained at the start, the purpose of navigation is very different. Get on your bike, and you want to go for a nice ride. Get in your car, and you want to be getting out of it at your destination as soon as possible.
It’s a little more complicated than that, of course. It’s easy to put a flat rectangular panel in the dash of a car, where the space on a motorcycle is necessarily much more cramped. Each bike has a different dash, some with round clocks still, some with small dashes, and some, like the BMW R1250RT, with a vast, tablet-sized TFT screen. One size definitely does not fit all.
And so my quest for the perfect motorcycle navigation solution continues. That, I suppose, is part of the fun.
Here’s a matrix of the features, price, and usability of the various options I have found so far.
| Navigation App/Device | ||||
| TomTom GO Ride | Google Maps | OSMAnd+ | Kurviger 3 | |
| Downloadable maps | Yes | Yes1 | Yes | Yes2 |
| Speed cameras – fixed | Yes | Yes | No3 | No |
| Speed cameras – mobile | Yes | Yes | No3 | No |
| Traffic | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| Can produce curvy routes? | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| Configurable road preference? | Medium | Low | Medium | High |
| Rating for interesting routes (1-10) |
7 | 5 | 6 | 9 |
| Import GPX routes/Files? | Yes | Yes6 | Yes | Yes |
| Cost | Beta/Free | Free7 | €9.99 | €19.99 |
| Cruiser | BMW Connected |
BMW Nav VI | ||
| Downloadable maps | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| Speed cameras – fixed | No3 | No | Yes | |
| Speed cameras – mobile | No3 | No | Yes4 | |
| Traffic | No | Yes | Yes4 | |
| Can produce curvy routes? | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| Configurable road preference? | High | Medium | Medium | |
| Rating for interesting routes (1-10) |
8 | 7 | N/A5 | |
| Import GPX routes/Files? | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| Cost | €9.99 | Free8 | €800ish | |
- You can download a section of a map to allow offline navigation
- After planning a route, you are given the option to download the area around the route to allow recalculation
- You can purchase separate lists of speed cameras as GPX files and show them as layers
- Requires a separate phone app and subscription
- I didn't try it, so I don't know
- You can import GPX files, but it's a pain in the arse and requires you to import it into a custom map on the web version
- You pay google with your location data, and everything else. All your data are belong to us
- Free, if you discount the need to buy a BMW motorcycle with TFT Connectivity