£200 or so will buy you loads of road atlases but you're much better off using the money to buy a Satnav. The amount of stress eliminated by being able to concentrate on the driving rather than navigating in unfamiliar territory is immeasurable. I bought a Tom Tom One XL with UK and Western Europe maps in July 2007, and I can thoroughly recommend it. Of course, unless you're a delivery driver or regularly travel to previously-unvisited places your Satnav will spend long periods sitting unused, but it'll still be very useful when needed. Various reviews have mentioned valid points such as the lack of a carrying case; no mains charger and no coverage of the Channel Islands, but I wouldn't say that any of these are show-stoppers. I do wonder whether the people who say that the sucker doesn't stick are wetting it before attaching to the windscreen. I always have a job pulling ours off the widescreen, and it has not once fallen off. A word of warning about the accompanying PC software: I… more »

£200 or so will buy you loads of road atlases but you're much better off using the money to buy a Satnav. The amount of stress eliminated by being able to concentrate on the driving rather than navigating in unfamiliar territory is immeasurable. I bought a Tom Tom One XL with UK and Western Europe maps in July 2007, and I can thoroughly recommend it. Of course, unless you're a delivery driver or regularly travel to previously-unvisited places your Satnav will spend long periods sitting unused, but it'll still be very useful when needed. Various reviews have mentioned valid points such as the lack of a carrying case; no mains charger and no coverage of the Channel Islands, but I wouldn't say that any of these are show-stoppers. I do wonder whether the people who say that the sucker doesn't stick are wetting it before attaching to the windscreen. I always have a job pulling ours off the widescreen, and it has not once fallen off. A word of warning about the accompanying PC software: I nearly killed my unit whilst updating the main operating system on it. I had connected it to my PC prior to lending it to a friend - the software said that there were ephemeral updates (those are updates on what parts of the earth each satellite is orbiting), and also a newer version of the main program. There was insufficient spare memory to apply the updated program without making space first by temporarily deleting the existing one. To be fair, the software did warn me that this wasn't recommended, but what else could I do? I applied the updates after making space but when I tried restoring the temporarily-removed maps etc. it said that this wasn't possible because the main program was missing! I overcame this by installing the software on another PC (phew!). Judging by comments by others I was lucky that I didn't need technical support. I'm not entirely convinced that the wide screen on the XL is worth the extra money. You see more of what is to your left and right (or is the map just a stretched version of the non-widescreen?), but surely it would be better to see more of what's ahead? At least there's more screen space to display other information such as average speed, bearing and estimated arrival time. All in all this is the best electronic product that I've purchased this year.