GPSrChive Discussion Forum

Hello,

I have a Garmin RV 895 GPS with North American maps installed and I am planning a camping car road trip to France later this year and I will bring my RV GPS with me.
My question is about maps, should I buy the Garmin Europe maps or will the free OSM based maps available on the internet will do fine? I am thinking of this map in particular: freizeitkarte-osm.de/garmin/en/westeuropa This map is based on data from the OpenStreetMap project.

The Garmin RV GPS models takes the size of the vehicle in consideration when planning a route, will this OSM based map have the information needed for the GPS to be able to handle vehicule size?

Thanks for any insights you may have.

Most OSM based maps for Garmin are geared towards outdoor activities, so they might not work well for automotive routing in general and RVs in particular. The way the map has been created influences the routing, for example OpenFietsMap disables routing over highways and will prefer cycleways independent of the routing profile chosen in the Garmin device.

There are some exceptions, like OpenMapChest, which is geared towards automotive use, or the Road variants of frikart.

Also 3rd party maps don’t support features like speed limits, junctions and lane assist

You might be better off buying the official Garmin maps for Europe for your RV 895 to be able to use its full feature set.

Thank you very much JungleJim for this insightful answer.