I've had a garmin GPS navigation system for years and it's great. You can search by name (ie. tap in Wells Fargo and it will show you all the Wells Fargoi Banks near you). Why can my $1000 Garmin do this and BMW nav. not do this? It's very frustrating to know the name of where you want to go but not be able to locate it within the navigation system because you can't search by name.

Am I missing something here??

 

You're not missing anything except the ability to search. It's funny, I think the second post I made after getting my car last December (the first was to praise it's unbelievable driving experience) was to ask the same question you did. My old 97 Acura could do this. It's an obvious failure of the product team considering the data is certainly in the Nav database. I assumed it would be fixed - it hasn't so far....

 

I have found that searching by specific items at my location (i.e. ATM's) I can accomplish this somewhat. ALthough it will show all the ATMs in the area - it does show the bank name. I like the search by location better than our Lexus Nav search. With the BMW Nav - the list by name is much better than the spots on the map that we have to touch to even see what they are.

 

Yes I have a 5 year old GPS navigation that searches great. It's purely a software function and has no special hardware requirements which makes it especially frustrating that such a high end vehicle has such a limited nav system. That's true of European cars in general. My brothers Range Rover is equally lame. The Japanese are light years ahead on this.

 

We just bought a Subaru Tribeca (yeah, I know, I know...) for my wife.
It has a touch screen navi system (originally from Kenwood), which is - I hate to say it - orders of magnitude better than my E60 system.
You can search any which way you want, the route calculation is much faster, its easier to use, etc.
Kind of embarassing for BMW....

 

Preparing to get flamed :'( .
I have to agree and not only on this feature.

 

AMEN! My Garmin 2610 is 2 yrs old and is much friendlier and capable than I've seen in my limited (but adequate I think) exposure to the E60 Navi. I bought the Navi option just for resale...I intend to use my portable Garmin navi for all my heavy lifting. BMW could easily fix this with software...the data is apparently already there in the database. I would also like to see the ability to preform nav databases with custom waypoints and route listings and then download them to the E60 via a USB port from your laptop of PDA. Can't be that hard...