Last year’s experience with the Wahoo Elemnt Bolt convinced
me that Icould tour with just the Wahoo Bolt as a navigation unit. This was a
mistake. The Wahoo Element Bolt does not itself handle navigation duties. You have
to create a route before hand, either by using RideWithGPS on a phone, which is
a horrible experience and prone to error, or using an app like Komoot, or
depending on Google Maps bicycle routing, which may or may not work in certain
countries like Italy.
This is not a problem 80 percent of the time, but the rest
of the time it causes major grief. For instance, on our first day I made a
route selection error by using Komoot’s “Road Bike” setting instead of “Touring
Setting”, which put us on some very busy roads. Well, changing that required
stopping, and rerunning Komoot, and then waiing ten minutes while the Elemnt
App sync’d to the cloud to acquire the new route. This is unacceptable much of
the time.
In Trentino, Komoot screwed up and directed us to the wrong
place. It was hot and we were both in distress, so rather than wait for the
stupid machine to sync, I resorted to giving Bowen my smart phone and having
him navigate us to the hotel. In the mountains, I know the roads well enough
that I would basically never get lost, but in big cities with dense road
networks, it just doesn’t work. Komoot most of the time is pretty good at
finding bike paths that I myself might not have found on a map, but its address
accuracy is in question. Google has the opposite problem: it would find an
address just fine, but it has a tendency to find “bike paths” where none exist,
or where the connection is obviously a walking trail.
Now, the problem with using Google as the navigation device
for the Wahoo is that Wahoo will not allow you to preload a route from Google!
That means if the night before you found an ideal route, you can’t sync it to
your Wahoo. You have to wait until the morning when you can leave the device on
after designating the route in the app. Not only can Google’s routing change
dramatically between times of day, even
worse, what you see in Google Maps is rarely what you see in the Wahoo Elemnt
App, even though it’s “powered by Google.” This sort of inconsistency will
drive you nuts, and I see no reason to put up with it when my Garmin units in
the past have always been rock solid reliable and work even without an internet
connection.
There are other functionality issues with the Bolt as well.
For instance, unless you have the Elemnt app on your smartphone in the
foreground when you power up the Wahoo, the device will not pair with your
phone. All through the tour, not once did my Wahoo ever sync the ride with any
of the services I’d designated the sync. Fortunately, the one service I care
about, which is Strava, syncs only through my Garmin Vivoactive HR, which has
stayed reliable over the entire trip.
Between the routing and navigation problems, and the lack of
support for major safety acccessories such as the Varia Bike Radar, the next
time I tour I will buy a Garmin bike navigation unit that’s smart enough to
route without the internet being an issue. The Wahoo unit just doesn’t cut it
for anyone exploring new territory. Not only is offline navigation a serious
necessity when touring, the price you pay for peace of mind in case your phone
breaks in the middle of nowhere is well worth the Garmin premium.
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