Plan your highway break with just one click

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Long drives are always fun and exciting. It gives you the sense of freedom and is filled with positive vibes. But this feeling could change within few minutes in case of an emergency.

Toyota is launching a newly-developed Restroom Finder app on May 21. This mobile application which will guide the passengers with routes and also provides detailed information about facilities, such as ease of access to the restrooms located on highways and public roads. At present, the app offers information of only few places in the Tokai region of Japan.

The app can filter search results by facility type or user needs, including the location of handrails or presence of care beds, diaper-changing tables and ostomate facilities. Users can also view detailed information on facilities that fit the search parameters and set them as destinations. In addition, even if a destination has already been set in the initial navigation screen, facilities can be added as enroute stops or as additional destinations.

This application makes perfect sense for small countries like Japan. Creating something like this in India is a big task because the land coverage is vast. It will be next to impossible to collate all this information until and unless the government agencies in the country provide some kind of support. There are many manufacturers like BMW who have such apps built-in their infotainment system. We recently experienced a long drive on the BMW X5 and the infotainment system did help us to plan our journey.