I've owned a fairly high spec 2006 BMW 535 ‘M’ Sport for some 18 months and one of the important extras I sought was the satellite navigation system. I had a simple Garmin system in my previous car. It cost around £150 and was a delight to use. It has taken me some time to realise that, despite the BMW sat nav’s exorbitant cost when new (circa £2,000), it does not perform one of the most fundamental functions normally considered as being essential. I refer to the navigation system not accepting the UK’s 7-digit postcode address (it only accepts the first 5 digits as used in Germany).

The only way around this is to manually input the street name and address number, but in practice so many destinations only have one of these. Needless to say this was not pointed out to me at the time of purchase. I have spoken to BMW who somewhat dismissively say most other car manufacturers systems suffer from the same limitation (inc Mercedes-Benz, Audi, etc). Is this so, and if so, why do we in the UK have to accept this, especially given the reasonable price and availability of superior off-the-shelf systems such as Tom Tom, Garmin, Navman, etc., whose products get you to within metres of your destination?