It happens to be the latest thing in in-vehicle chic, but Ireland's drivers can be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about.
In-car navigation has come a long way from the days when your partner shouted directions when to turn (usually too late) to execute the required manoeuvre.
Thanks to the US Department of Defence and their NavStar constellation of global positioning satellites (GPS), car manufacturers have been adding prestige to their model ranges by offering navigation systems as part of the package.
Adding anything between €1,000 and €2,000 to the delivery price, a navigation system was seen as the ultimate "must have" accessory.
It was an ingenious idea - a receiver could monitor the signals from three or more orbiting satellites and use this to calculate your precise location, to an accuracy of five metres, and it could do this for any location on Earth (with the exception of the north and south poles).
If traditional maps could be digitised and displayed, by overlaying your position from the GPS satellites onto this map, you would never be lost.
Add to this the possibility of setting your destination and this futuristic map could then suggest the best route to take, providing spoken instructions to the driver: "Turn left, 500 yards" or "leave roundabout at second exit", until you reached your destination.
Best of all, should you miss your intended turn, the navigation system would recalculate the route and provide additional instructions to get you back on the correct road.
Impressed? It's hard not to be, but for those drivers who made the investment, privately they were seething with anger. This was because precise point-to-point navigation in Ireland was an impossibility, because the car navigation system suppliers could not provide detailed maps of Ireland.
Provided on CD or DVD, these maps-on-a-disc would slide into a dedicated player which forms an integral part of the navigation system.
Alpine, one of the best known car navigation manufacturers, boasts street mapping of Europe on a single disc including 100,000 cities, in the following countries; Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, England, Scotland, and Wales.
For good measure, maps of Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco, San Marino and the Vatican State are also included.
Have you noticed at least one glaring omission?
It may come as a shock to live in the modern equivalent of "here be dragons' territory", a terms used by early mapmakers to conceal the fact that nobody had collated the information, and the problem didn't affect just Alpine but VDO Dayton, the other major supplier.
The 32 counties of Ireland can boast two organisations with more than a passing interest in maps, Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland (OSNI), and Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSI).
Without wanting to be uncharitable to these established organisations, both appear to be happy to promote their printed map products, but you will search in vain for a CD digital map of Ireland to use for vehicle navigation.
In the last few months, things have taken a turn for the better, but we have to thank a US outfit called NavTech. They have released their 2002 Great Britain CD that features full street mapping of GB, and unlike previous versions that provided only rudimentary mapping of Ireland, this has been enhanced and now offers primary and secondary roads in addition to street-level navigation (including names) for Belfast, Dublin and, wait for it, Killarney.
Strange as it may seem, every street in the town along with the cinema, railway, bus and Garda stations have been meticulously plotted.
True, this doesn't really take up a lot of data, but at least it is a start, and will keep tourists happy as they navigate around the Ring of Kerry.
Dublin is better served, with street detail shown from Swords in the north to Shankill in the south. Even the M50 makes it all the way around to Ballinteer.
A nod of thanks must go to Navtech for this major enhancement, even if it is only an extra megabyte or so, tacked on to the Great Britain CD.
Drivers who already have compatible navigation systems only need to update their mapping disc for all those devious short cuts to get round the city's traffic gridlock.
Full information is available from their website - www.navtech.com.
Finally, if you feel €1,500 is too much to pay for knowledge taxi drivers might envy, portable systems can offer the same functionality and, as a bonus, can be transferred between vehicles.
Look out for recently-launched Garmin GPS V, only a black and white display, but as small as a mobile phone and ideal for pedestrians and cyclists alike.
The StreetPilot (also from Garmin) provides a full colour display, and is ideal for multi-car use.
Users download local data from the supplied CD, and transfer it using their PC, making it useful on holiday too.
For once we can proudly claim for the first time, Ireland is truly "on the map"!