Connected traffic, any good?

I seemingly have several of the connected services s activities in the car, can send destinations, locate the car, lock etc from my phone. A bonus as I haven’t paid for these myself. Seem to be part of the tech pack in the car.
I have the option of buying the live traffic updates. Do these work? Worth the money to update the sat nav directions?

 

The Real Time Traffic Information is very good.

On my E61, I found the traffic information to be very poor. I continued to use my TomTom in preference to the built-in satnav because the TomTom was much more effective at routing around traffic.

On my F11, the RTTI traffic information is every bit as good as TomTom Traffic. When I first got the car, I did a few long journeys with both the built-in satnav and the TomTom switched on. They both detected the same traffic jams and came up with the same detours, so I felt confident that I could ditch the TomTom. Annoyingly, I recently wanted to resubscribe to TomTom Traffic on my TomTom and found that TomTom had deactivated the SIM card because I hadn't used TomTom Live services for 18 months.

 

I've found that RTTI traffic info to be useful. It's good the way that the NAV screen shows the various colour bands, so the map can be scrolled to see the extent of the congestion. Not sure whether it's worth the new charges though - £49 Pa, as BMW have bumped their prices up. It depends how much use it will get, I guess.

 

Similarly, I have found RTTI very useful and found it exceptionally so last Saturday when coming back along the A40 to Witney from Gloucester, when they closed the road to do footbridge repairs.
I used it all the time on my previous X3 and of course, have got 3 years subscription with the new X1.

 

Yeah it’s accurate and fab on my F15. I think it was 90 pound for the package for 12 months.


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Thanks for the feedback. Sounds like something I will get. Need to look at the options on price and options.

 

Found it very good when visiting family in England Or on holiday. No use in Wales as we are not permitted to use the car

 

These are the options, seems to be the £99 even though I have remote services already.

 

Not sure why it posted multiple images. Sorry.

 

I found RTTI to be one of the must haves to be honest/ that said if you’ve Apple car play then you can link to other sat navs with traffic info...still worth having IMO

 

You can do the RTTI separately as you can see

 

I was a looking at the value of the £99 option, map updates and RTTI.
Will check which map version is in the car currently, might be 2017 or might have been updated.

 

If you can wait around a month BMW seem to run 'black friday' deals so you may get 25% off the price. They have done the last few years. The previous owner of my 'new' 640d never updated the maps from when the car was built so I am going to see if connected drive run a deal at the end of November and update my maps then if they do.

 

That is a very good shout. Will certainly wait to see if there is an offer in a few weeks.

 

I wonder if it varies depending upon country/route?
Checking back on the photos I had of the F30, 2013 car owned in 2015, I can see a pic of the sat nav with red routes on the M5. Now I think about it that had RTTI, and I found it pretty useful on occasion.

 

I find it very interesting to see the different opinions about how to use RTTI. Especially as my new 2020 LCI X1 xDrive 2.0i M Sport comes with it because it has a subscription for 3 years with the complete package with Navigation Pro and the 10.25" touch screen. Just be aware, the later LCI X1 still has the previous but still very functional iDrive version 6 and not the later fully digital iDrive 7.

Not everyone appreciates that if you have your car set up on the BMW ConnectedDrive server and you are logged into your car and are connected to the account that RTTI is always active. This is especially relevant if you have dynamic routing enabled and are following its directions and traveling over distances, you will get rerouted. On my X3 (F25) some years ago, (earlier software version), the navigation voice would advise me that my route had been recalculated due to traffic conditions. I still have not heard this on the X1, but it is early days.

My new X1 still shows traffic conditions with red lines, but I do not see the list of hold-ups unless I touch the RTTI icon on the side of the menu. This gives me the list in miles from my current position. I touch it again to go back to the main route map.

 

I’ve got the live traffic reports ticked as an option. While I’m waiting to see if there is a sale of sorts I will trial the current radio data system, it was ok on the E92 (2012 software) so will see if the 2017 version is any better.
The car doesn’t have wireless charging as an option, so there is no Apple CarPlay software upgrade available. I’ve lived by Google maps for the past five years, always spot on, but want to use the car system in the F32.