If you’ve been looking at the price of aftermarket devices that offer front collision avoidance, lane departure warnings, and other safety and alertness features, you know 
that they can be expensive and you have to have them professionally installed. And of course buying a new car for all the latest safety features will cost you a mint. But The Garmin DriveAssist 50LMT (Lifetime Maps and Traffic), with a very response 5″ touchscreen, combines many of the functions found in Garmin’s earlier NuviCam along with a smorgasbord of useful features in a reasonably priced package ($300).
One Reviewer refers to the DriveAssist as the “Swiss Army Knife” of car navigation devices. Let’s start off with the basics. The DriveAssist has voice command so you can tell it where you want to go. It comes with lifetime maps and traffic avoidance/alerts. It includes a dashcam that continuously records your trip and immediately stores it in case of a sudden impact. You can also store the video on an optional removable micro SD card.
The DriveAssist offers up a whole range of warnings and advisories. It cautions you about upcoming curves, speed changes, school zones, speed cameras, red light cameras, and more. If you’re on a particularly curvy stretch of roadway, you might find it information overload. By using the dashcam, it will also provide you with lane departure warnings and frontal collision avoidance warning.
Each iteration of Garmin devices has better voice interaction. It’s still not perfect, but it will get the address right more than 90% of the time. And you can ask the DriveAssist to find things like McDonald’s, hospitals, gas stations, train stations, etc. And when it gives directions it will give you landmarks: “take a left in front of the Bank Of America.” Increasingly it is capable of finding locations within a single destination, so things like specific terminals within an airport.
The Lifetime Traffic avoidance and alert function will tell you how far down the road you’ll run into a traffic jam, how long the backup might be, and where feasible, it will offer a time saving detour. The device is easy to pair with your smartphone via Bluetooth so you can answer calls and get notifications.
Bottom line is that if you’re looking for a comprehensive set of automotive navigation and safety devices, this is it, and at $300 it’s a solid value proposition as well.
The post Garmin DriveAssist LMT50 – An Easy Safety Upgrade for Your Car appeared first on Tech50+.