Abstract: The Driver's Associate assists a driver of a vehicle to more efficiently reach a desired destination, to record the route driven, and to provide driving summary reports. The present invention uses a unique method for tracking the dead-reckoned coordinate of the vehicle by using a sum-of-squares or .chi..sup.2 minimization algorithm for plotting the navigation route, tracking the vehicle through the road map database, and for normalizing the vehicle's location between the dead-reckoned coordinate and the roadway projected coordinate. The present invention also uses a Singular Value Decomposition method for optimizing the normalization process so that we can track a vehicle's location more accurately than other navigation devices.