Others say...

"Helpful but buggy"
I used Autoroute Europe 2006 on a recent trip to France, Germany, Czech Republic.

The routing, voice guidance, and detour features were all very useful and added to my enjoyment of my trip.

I had good luck with the road info even helping me find some out of the way places in Berlin that I remembered from when I lived there, but needed a little help finding the exact spot.

The program routed me into a Taxi/Bus only area of a city in Czech Republic. For which I was stopped by a polite policeman who told me how to continue. There may have been signs indicating that (in the Czech Alphabet) but I didn't recognize them.

I am accustomed to using a Garmin GPSMap 276C self contained, fairly high end GPS unit. I opted for this progam because of its price. Garmin charges over 300 USD for the European map set.

I had major problems with the program freezing (hourglass). When it froze Windows XP would not be able to close the program (or re-launch it) so many times I was forced to reboot the computer. Of course this seemed to happen when a crucial turn / exit was coming up or when I had wandered off route and was trying to return.

I was using a fairly recent Toshiba Tablet PC, that met all the requirements for the program, with a Garmin etrex vista-C feeding the GPS info. Knowledge base articles suggested updating video drivers but that didn't help.

This requires a person other than the driver to be doing the navigation duties except for the most basic trips.

"Get Lost ! - it's easy with this software"
We just returned from a trip to France where we had a rental car for 10 days and covered about 2000km.

We used this software on a laptop with an earthmate USB GPS receiver ( you will need the driver from the DeLorme site to make it appear as a serial device to make it work with this software )

The driving directions were very bad, for example it would have you on an autoroute for 60 miles, and the next direction would be "at exit so-and-so continue on the A61" which is the road you are already on. A bit confusing.

It also gave us incorrect directions at several roundabouts, saying "Take the 3 exit off of the roundabout" and it should have been the 2nd exit or the 4th, and you don't know this until you are off course, then you need to turn around or reroute from the current position.

Also it would tell you that the next roundabut was 17 miles away and to take the 2nd exit, but there were 5 roudabouts in between that weren't mentioned, in these cases you were just treating the roundabouts as intersections and going through them, but that should be included in the driving directions.

Also it refers to all routes by number D376, E9 and so on, unfortuntely the normal map based navigation in France is done by knowing the City or "direction" you want, with a map it's easy to determine this. Almost without exception at roundabouts the route numbers ( except autoroutes ) are not given. This combined with it being confused about exits on the roundabouts, makes it very hard to depend on.

Another problem we had was in the autoroutes around Toulouse, it would not give correct ( or at least useful ) information about which direction to go. there was one point where the autoroute split into 2, and you had to know before hitting toll booth ( 2 sets of booths, about 20 booths total, one set was the right one, but it wasn't clear if it was the left or the right set ) and we made a wrong turn, rerouted, was given a similar situation, which we guessed wrong again on, did this 3 times, thinking it would get better. We switched to looking at a AAA map to determine the City we wanted to go toward and that worked fine. Didn't make us miss our flight, but if we hadn't figured extra time it could have.

The interface is clumsy and hard to figure out, I was talking my wife through things at 6:00am to catch a flight, in the dark, on an autoroute and it was not as simple as it should be.

I would go Tom-Tom next time, but that is much more expensive, for less money a good detailed Michelin guide served us very well on previous trips and wished for it many times during the trip.

All things considered, I would not suggest it, it did route OK, but the directions were not very good.

Other than determining approximate travel time and general routes between locations ( which you can do on line ) I would stay away from it.

"Auto Traveling in Europe - A breeeeeeeeze"
In 2004, had to buy Autoroute from English merchant for more than twice this price - and it was worth it. On arrival in Calais, to departure from Paris three weeks later (thru Reims, Bastogne, Strasbourg, Dijon, Caen, Paris, Bordeaux, Rennes, etc, this gem (with a GPS unit) offered continual real time "this is where you are" as well as "re-calculated routes" to get us where we wanted to go, no matter how many unplanned detours we took. Would never travel without it...
The four stars is only because I can't use speech to tell it how to operate - a real plus while driving!

"AutoRoute 2006 - town data missing "
The program is nearly the same as Streets and Trips for the US. It's generally good but does not include many of the streets in towns in Ireland where I used it. Excellent for going town to town but real deficiencies in the towns when looking for specific addresses.

"Good for laptop, not for PDA"
AutoRoute Europe 2006 is a very good, GPS based routing software for the laptop. It is a fraction of the price of equivalent routing software for Europe. The laptop version does everything one would expect ranging from address searches, GPS location and routing from point A to point B. It is a very good product.

However, Microsoft continues to not understand the power in modern PDAs. The worst applications on my PDA are all from Microsoft and this one joins the group. Whereas the laptop version understands "Europe" as a whole, the PDA version can only "see" a city at a time -- and only those cities you individually download. The PDA version has no routing capability. You can search to locations by address and find them on the map and you can use a GPS to locate where you are, but it will not "route" and give directions on how to get there. The data and resolution on the PDA version is very limited.

If you are buying this product for your laptop, then I highly recommend it. For your PDA, this is mostly just a set of city maps with the ability of the GPS to tell you where you are. This is no where near the capability of other GPS routing packages. They cost significantly more, but they also do a LOT more!