When I last wrote about the Dash Express GPS unit, I was hopeful.  The unit had its problems, but the company seemed headed in the right direction.  That was a while ago.  Since then, I had to trade in two (2) defective units, and the company announced they would switch to being a software provider only and would no longer be making their own hardware.  Oh, and they played the CEO shuffle and laid-off 50 employees.

What happened?

The most obvious problem with the Dash Express was the hardware.  The thing was massively huge, and Dash’s reasoning for this was that they had packed so much stuff into a GPS unit, including a GPRS receiver and Wi-Fi, that they had to keep the size of the unit big.  This was crap.  Most smart phones pack all of these in a much smaller form factor, including GPS, and a lithium-ion battery that doesn’t crap out after twenty minutes.  My guess is that Dash cobbled together existing OEM parts from different suppliers instead of engineering their own, which made it cheaper and easier to get the product to market, but obviously cost them in size and reliability.

The company clearly also suffered from leadership problems.  Because of a shaky launch, Dash gave early adopters an extra three months of free service as a make-up gesture.  I got my DE about a month-and-a-half after launch.  The announcement came less than a month after my six month trial ended.  That means that Dash decided to completely abandon their previous business model not only less than a year after their sole product launch, but less than a few months after they had starting seeing any revenue at all.

Now I ain’t no big city market analyst or nuthin’, but that says to me that they were bleeding cash.  And if they were hurting that badly, then somebody in finance obviously had trouble with math and understanding that black numbers are good, and red numbers are bad.  Maybe someone forgot to carry a one somewhere.  To top all of that off, they announced their change to being solely a software provider without announcing a single hardware partner they’d be developing their platform for.  Not a good sign.

But the biggest problem for Dash, who billed themselves as a software company even before they abandoned their hardware, was that their software was half-baked at best. Their map data was low-grade, with missing information and bad addresses galore, and their routing algorithms were terrible.  While every GPS unit has its quirks, the DE software was practically nothing but quirks.  Features such as toll avoidance that are standard on most GPS units still have yet to be implemented into the Dash software.

For the most part, the customer service showed that they really were willing to work on these problems, but problem reports were a painful, three step problem: you’d have to log the problem in your dash, then check your email for a problem report, then cut-and-paste the problem report number into a form on Dash’s website.  Most people don’t enjoy being beta testers, and even fewer people like to pay for a product that isn’t finished.

The internet connectivity was what was supposed to set Dash apart from the other GPS units and make it worth the monthly service fee, but it never really worked properly, either.  The biggest selling point of Dash was the live traffic, with real-time traffic provided by other Dash users, and third-party traffic making up the difference when Dash user data was unavailable.  ”Real-time” meant every fifteen minutes, which isn’t nearly frequently enough for how quickly traffic changes.  I can’t remember how many times I’d approach a jam on a highway that was showing “green”, only to have Dash tell me that there was traffic ahead after I’d been stopped for five minutes.  Third-party highway traffic data was rarely accurate, and side streets took months to show traffic patterns without someone driving on them in the last hour.

The live search capability was also throttled by the poor choice of Yahoo! Local as the search data provider.  Yahoo!’s local search is editable by anyone wiki style, and info is frequently out-of-date or just plan bad.  Searches for Chick-Fil-A in several different areas led me to a Panera Bread, a Burger King, a run-down scary burger joint in the middle of a keep-your-doors-locked neighborhood, and Duncanville city hall.  The application API is a great idea, but implementation was clunky and awkward, and besides, it doesn’t matter if you can get cool programs for your GPS if your GPS doesn’t work properly to begin with.

It’d be very interesting to hear about what went wrong from someone who was inside the company (ahem…paging Mr. Zatz?) , but most of the problems really are apparent from the outside.  They could surprise everyone tomorrow and announce out of the blue that they’ve partnered with say, Toyota (because if any car manufacturer needs a new GPS partner, it’s Toyota), but I highly doubt it.  For all the effort and trailblazing Dash did in pioneering the first internet-connected GPS, it’s sad to see just how badly they failed.