Are Irish drivers being fobbed off with inferior satnavs? An Eircode query triggers a mapping mystery

Back in the early days of satellite navigation in cars, the map of Ireland looked like one of those world maps from the 1500s. There was a tiny semicircle of roads within and just outside Dublin’s M50 motorway, but the rest of the country was pretty much blank, digitally unmapped. The screen of your car, in those days, should have just said ‘Here be monsters’.

Things have improved dramatically since then, but there may yet be a glitch in Ireland’s mapping matrix, and it’s to do with Eircodes.

Eircodes have been in use since 2014, so surely in those eight years someone would have thought to include a line of software that more or less says, ‘This is what an Eircode is and this is how it works’

Introduced in 2014, and meant to be an Irish answer to the UK’s postcodes or US Zip codes, Eircodes have been a bit of a mixed bag. They work reasonably well, but their jumble of mismatched letters and numbers is far less easy to recall than UK postcodes. Nonetheless, they’re a useful addition to satnavs, as you can type in the Eircode for a particular house or location and the screen (and disembodied voice) should take you right there.

Except when it doesn’t. One motorist contacted The Irish Times to say they had recently bought a Ford and had tried to put an address into its satnav using the Eircode. The system gave them back whatever the touchscreen equivalent of a confused look is and refused to recognise the destination. Annoyed, and just to see what would happen, the reader then tried inputting a UK postcode. Ping – up popped the address straight away. Net of needing to board a ferry, they could have driven directly there.

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So an in-car system recognises UK postcodes but not Irish Eircodes. Are Irish car buyers once again being sold down the river and expected to put up with less functionality in an optional extra for which they’ve paid darned good money?

The answer? Possibly.

Our reader had complained to Ford about the no-Eircode thing but been partially batted away. Ford said the fault lay with the provider of the maps, not with itself. Now, after a great deal of emailing and phone calling, Ford has came back with a proper answer: “The car was sold with the most up-to-date maps, but there are occasional updates to the maps by our suppliers, and these are normally updated, at no cost to the customer, for example when the car is undergoing a service activity at an approved Ford service centre. There is also a facility for the customer to update the maps themselves through the Ford owners’ website. We will be in contact with the customer with a view to rectifying the situation to their satisfaction.”

Okay, so it’s not great that the car was sold without the correct systems in place, but selling a car first and fixing the software later is the way of this post-Tesla world. The thing is that Eircodes have been in use since 2014, so surely in those eight years someone would have thought to include a line of software that more or less says, ‘This is what an Eircode is and this is how it works.’

Is it possible that the major mapping companies are neglecting the Irish market, assuming that everyone just uses Google Maps now anyway?

Our next port of call was Eircode itself. The system was originally developed by Capita Business Support Services Ireland, trading as Eircode, and given a 10-year contract to design and run the system in 2013. In turn, Eircode is overseen by the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications. A department spokesperson told The Irish Times: “The largest international satnav providers have all integrated Eircodes within their products, ie Google Maps, Microsoft (Bing/Nokia Maps), TomTom, Here Navigation, Garmin and Apple. This enables members of the public and businesses to get directions and accurately locate addresses, particularly in rural areas...

“Eircode informed the department they have created a specific digital-mapping licence in order to enable broad use of Eircode data within the products and services offered by mapping-type organisations. Any queries around functionality contained in a vehicle’s satnav is a matter for the manufacturer and their mapping provider, as Eircode do not comment on individual end users or commercial licence arrangements.”

Aha, a digital-mapping licence. Is it possible, then, that the major mapping companies are neglecting the Irish market, assuming that everyone just uses Google Maps now anyway? Is this the source of the Eircode lack?

Possibly not. The Irish Times spoke to TomTom’s European head of communications, Vincent Martinier. He told us: “On TomTom maps, which we provide to many other car manufacturers, including Peugeot, Citroen, Opel, Fiat, Hyundai, Kia and Honda, it is possible to find places using the Eircode. We’ve captured Eircodes in our data since they were introduced back in 2014.”

Garmin, another major mapping supplier, did not respond to repeated requests for information, but a technical update on its website states: “Garmin is aware of Ireland’s new postal code system, called Eircode. This system has not yet been incorporated into preloaded city-navigator mapping for all compatible Garmin Automotive devices. We are working to establish a solution in order to provide the Eircode search capability in all of our compatible devices. Not all Garmin Automotive devices will be compatible with Eircodes, only those that contain maps of Ireland out of the box.”

What about Here? It is an American-Dutch mapping company, owned by a consortium that includes Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and the tech giant Intel. Formerly part of Nokia, it began as the US-based Navteq way back in 1985. It is, probably not coincidentally, the mapping provider for Ford. It is also, according to itself, not the problem. “Eircodes are compatible with maps from Here. They are a standard part of our postal addressing product which several of our customers are using, including vendors providing systems for Ford. Unfortunately we can’t comment on the issue of the software update itself, as we don’t know which system from Ford is used in this particular case,” said Dr Sebastian Kurme, Here’s head of media relations in the company’s Berlin office.

By coincidence, this week, I’m test-driving a Ford Mustang Mach-E electric SUV, the one with the enormous 15in Tesla-esque screen in the middle of the dash. Firing up the built-in satnav system, I typed in the Eircode for my mum’s house in west Cork, figuring that an obscure rural location would really put it to the test.

Ping. Up it popped, straight away. The system even worked out that I’d need to charge up the car on the way down and offered me some options for topping up en route.

Possibly, then, the problem really does lie with Eircode itself and the way in which the codes have been created. Talking to one Irish motor-industry insider, who asked that we not use their name, Eircodes might be problematic for more than a few satnav systems. It seems that the Irish government did not follow a European model when setting up Eircodes, which has made it difficult to integrate them. One multifranchise car dealer mentioned to this insider that they have not seen any satnav system that works properly with Eircodes.

We put this to Eircode, which remains adamant that its systems are fully integrated with all major providers, but there was a tacit admission that the Eircode system is not like those of other European nations. A spokesperson from the department commented: “Eircodes were introduced to facilitate better provisioning of services to people and businesses and to resolve the problem of non-unique addresses in the State. Approximately 35 per cent of addresses in Ireland are non-unique, meaning they share an address with one or more other property. To resolve this issue, Eircodes were designed to uniquely identify properties using geolocations. This ensures that the Eircode system is future-proofed and the first of its kind in Europe.

“The design of the Eircode system followed a public procurement process. During that process a range of options for the postcode structure were evaluated. That evaluation process, along with the stakeholder engagement that preceded the procurement, helped to inform the final format of the Eircode design.”

The solution? For now, at any rate, plug in your phone and rely on Google or Apple instead. Here may not be monsters, but there may not be any Eircodes either.