So, my friend just got a Honda Accord. I thought, well whatever, I used to have an Accord and it was a reliable albeit boring and frugal car to drive. Well this Accord is a brand new V6 Hybrid with 250hp or something and it's basically got all the Acura bells and whistles on the inside. It's got leather throughout and one of those fancy new touchscreen, voice activated nav systems. I'm like, wow, my 04 S4 is starting to seem rather plain in comparison -- to an Accord!

So I've been looking at an RNS-E nav upgrade for a while now, but I'm not sure whether I'll really use it enough to make the $1500 cost of an upgraded EU->US unit worthwhile. For those of you, who've had it for more than 6 months, does it continue to come in handy, or does the novelty wear off to the point that it becomes expensive eye candy to impress passengers?

Also, is it intuitive to navigate with clunky buttons and dials versus the touchscreens that come with some of the latest NAVs? I'm sure I can use it, but can passengers figure their way around as intuitively as a touchscreen?

I suppose if I knew I'd be able to sell the car for $1k more 4 years from now, I wouldn'e be so hesitant to put it in, but I'm just not sure I'll ever recoup much of the investment, and it's a lot for a nav that's already starting to look a bit long in the tooth.

SD cards are very nice, the navigation works reliable and the MMI buttons are somehow intuitive to use once you got familiar with its logic. On the plus side are no fingerprints on the screen and the OEM look. You won't get voice activation for the navi or anything else for the $1.5k target price. But it's still a very nice system which makes the B6 look like a B7 form the inside while keeping the B6 look on the outside.

I felt like you did but at some point I realized that this is as good as it gets for us. And it's very good! It's not the best, in every single aspect that you consider, there's a car out there that can do something better or has some feature that yours doesn't. But as a package, for me... there's nothing I'd rather have than my car. And the nav just strengthened my appreciation for my car. For me, it's now complete.

Your friend's Honda has ONE thing that's better than your car (well, two, if gas mileage matters to you). We could write quite the list on what's much better about our car.

Just my 0.02...

<ul><li><a href="http://www.navplus.us/forum/viewtopic.php?t=180">http://www.navplus.us/forum/viewtopic.php?t=180</a</li></ul>