A new product may not be better than the old one it replaced

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On May 18, 2026 I blogged about Attending the 2026 District 15 Conference of Toastmasters International. When I plugged the Garmin Drive 52 GPS into the car adapter for my return trip, I found it apparently was dead. The car adapter really had died, but that also damaged the GPS battery which would no longer hold a charge.

 

A few weeks ago I ordered a newer model from Amazon, a Garmin Drive 53 also with a five-inch screen (as shown above). I was going to start out by downloading the latest GPS software and latest map.

 

That Drive 53 arrived stuck in Demonstration Mode. On the screen they cryptically just said to drive to exit. Exactly how to get it out was not mentioned in the instruction manual. I went to the Garmin web site and found a support page titled How to get an Automotive Device out of Demo Mode which told me:

 

“If your device is in demo mode, you may disable this mode by simply driving around with the device, traveling at least 10 miles per hour for at least 30 seconds.”

 

I went for a brief drive. Then I downloaded the latest Garmin Express software to my Lenovo Windows laptop. I connected the new GPS to its USB port with the supplied cable, downloaded the latest GPS software version and downloaded the latest map. Those operations took about six hours. Then I registered the GPS on the Garmin web site.

 

The Drive 53 came with a socket mounted on its back meant to mate with a ball mount that I had attached to my car’s dashboard. But when I tried to plug my GPS in, I found they had made the new socket just slightly smaller than that old ball. It would not snap on. So, I had to reuse the socket mount from the back of my old Drive 52.

 

With the Drive 52, on short trips I sometimes had just ran it on the internal battery rather than plugging in the car adapter. That does not work on the Drive 53. It senses the internal battery drain, and immediately reduces the brightness to where the display is not visible in daylight. There is no setting to override the reduced brightness.

 

But I like that the Garmin GPS has free lifetime map updates, which I discussed in a blog post on June 17, 2017 about my earlier TomTom titled How is a car GPS like a razor?