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There’s A Reason You Can’t Get Navigation On The 2020 Nissan Sentra


No amount of money will get you a navigation system in the new, 2020 Nissan Sentra.

The new Sentra compact sedan, now in its eighth generation, starts at $19,090 for the base S trim. But even if you opt for the highest trim level, the $21,430 SR, and the best infotainment package, you simply cannot get a built-in navigation system. Instead, Nissan is relying on you bringing your own smartphone to connect to the Android Auto and Apple CarPlay feature that’s standard on the SV and SR trim levels.

“We cannot do everything we wanted, because if we did, the car would be $40,000,” said Laurent Marion, senior manager of product planning at Nissan. “It’s not a Sentra any longer at that price point. For that price point, making sure we are really focusing on what is most important for the customers, we sometimes have to make some trade offs. A car that is $40-50,000, at that price point you can have both, even though I don’t know if it’s really needed.”

“For $50,000, you can have everything. For $20,000?”

Laurent Marion, Nissan product planner

Nissan made the same decision in the new Versa, a sign that the days of getting a navigation systems as an option in lower-cost models may be numbered. The new Versa follows the same pattern as the Sentra, relying on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto to provide navigation information. With the Sentra, Marion said that Nissan decided to not offer a built-in navigation system because the company wanted to focus on things that the driver will see and touch every day, like the premium materials and design and the overall quality of the car. These are things that bring a smile to the driver, he said, whereas a built-in nav system probably wouldn’t get used that much.

“All of the customers have a smartphone,” he said. “I don’t recall the last time I used on-board navigation. Even when I had on-board navigation I was using my phone because I prefer Google Maps or Waze and the on-board navigation was outdated or not getting the traffic updates.”

Removing built-in nav technologies in lower-end cars makes sense since offering the feature means more than writing the software to display a map on the infotainment screen. Nav systems require that map data, of course, but also GPS sensors and wheel sensors to track the car if the GPS signal is lost in a tunnel, for example.

“It’s not just a map,” he said. “In terms of hardware, it gets pretty expensive. We’ve been trying to make sure that what we put in the car will be used by the customers.”





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