Finally, some respite for Indian motorists tackling heavy city traffic and potholed roads every day. Dutch navigation company TomTom, which announced its entry into India last September, is moving forward to make its products available to the retail customer. To begin with it will offer three portable navigation devices under its Via range — the Via 100, the Via 120, and the Via 125 — that are loaded with local maps. The devices are priced between Rs 15,000 and Rs 19,000. TomTom is in talks with various automakers in India and soon the products will be available at Reliance Autozones and Reliance Digital, besides independent car accessory dealers and car dealers.
TomTom has spent the last decade building street maps in India, but opened a sales office in the country a year-and-a-half back. Advanced lane guidance, spoken street names, voice controlled navigation and handsfree bluetooth are some of the distinctive features of TomTom. But the most unique feature that has been typically designed to cater to the Indian market is the ‘landmark navigation’. This allows the drivers search for the nearest landmark that can be a park, an office, a temple etc. TomTom is perhaps the first navigation provider to bring localised landmark navigation to India.
Another feature, the ‘help me’, locates the nearest emergency services. From hospitals to roadside assistance, this feature offers everything a driver could need to stay safe on the roads. The ‘advanced lane guidance’ featurehelpfully prompts the driver to stick to the appropriate side of the road depending on the nearest next turn.
TomTom can also be of great use to the Indian women drivers. Some of the Indian cities — something that is widely known and recognised — are quite unsafe for women especially after dark. With a suitable navigation system, one can avoid any untoward incidents as the driver will have a clear idea of the roads.
Among the more prominent brands providing navigation services in India currently are MapMyIndia and Garmin. Most smartphones and tablets these days offer navigation solutions and maps to users via inbuilt GPS functions. Yet, the navigation market in India is at a nascent stage which is pushing TomTom to spend a lot of time educating potential buyers about the category and the value of the product.
One of the many challenges the company is facing has to do with the fact that 70 per cent of the streets do not have names. As a result some of the features have been customised for the Indian market. “When compared with the Western world, the distribution channel in India is not organised and is segmented,” says Jocelyn Vigreux, general manager and senior vice-president, TomTom India. He claims that such a situation hampers the penetration of the product into the market. “It is actually difficult to find people with experience in navigation here,” he laments.
While India is still a very small market for Tom Tom, its market share in Europe is 45 per cent, and in North America it is 25 per cent (Q3 2011).