Has anyone seen any articles speaking to Lexus' inclination of including a real time nav feature to their vehicles for the upcoming model year? Specifically their ES brand?

 

Are you referring to the real-time traffic like Acura is doing? (I should have patented that when I thought of it 5 years ago!)

 

Yup. Infiniti G35 will have it too.
Seeing as Lexus is not offering Sirius anymore, if I am going to be stuck with XM, may as well have the traffic update feature.

 

I have real-time traffic in my portable GPS, and it's fairly useless. I know it seems like a great idea, but the implementation isn't what you'd hope. Updates are far less than instantaneous. Say, if there's an accident, it won't appear for quite some time. It's also very imprecise. It doesn't know that traffic is travelling at 20 mph on one road and 45 mph on another road to logically route you the quickest way. It simply knows generically that there's congestion, an accident, or construction, and lets you guess how bad it really is and if it would be any faster to route around it.

It also only works in a few choice locations--though Chicago is probably one of them.

 

Yup, I have it on a couple of my cars and its pretty useless too. Just a "wow" factor for everyone else.

 

For those of us in the SF Bay area, while I do not have traffic info on my Nav, we all have access to 511. This is a very useful tool that has pretty timely traffic info for the cost of a few cellular minutes.

 

Here in the Philly area, there's a few traffic companies doing work. They've installed real-time traffic monitors on the roads here (From the looks of it, the unit stares at the road and I assume can see a car go by and the speed.) From the speed ratings, they can determine traffic. But that's a lot of infrastructure! Not sure how often they poll that information and post it, but I think that's where the lag is around here.

Friend of mine just got the RL and he said the traffic feature saved him a few times, but he's also retired and I'm not sure how much driving he really does with "traffic."