Don't Japanese people have smartphones or tablets with navigation on them that they can use? I'd rather cars just have a place I can mount my own device, rather than include any kind of screen whatsoever with crappy un-updated, un-maintained software.
This is sort of the goal of Android Auto and CarPlay, but not as a mount for your phone. Rather, it turns the screen into a dumb terminal for your phone, bypassing all the shitty built-in software and providing a UX designed specifically for use while driving.
And critically lets you directly access CarPlay interfaces to apps for streaming, podcasts, navigation, etc, all of which is much richer than a dumb audio only passthru with skip buttons.
Cars can have better GPS reception, which is important when you're trying to drive in an urban area with a lot of buildings. Phones are bad at accuracy there.
(CarPlay can provide car GPS to the phone though.)
It just pretends to be more accurate by using AI. A car tends to be more raw, which is what you want when navigating at speed.
As someone who used to help out with Waze maps, raw GPS tracks from phones can be WAAAY off from actual roads and other GPS tracks.
Your phone looks for the most likely road for you to be on and snaps you to that road. Your car does a similar thing but has much higher GPS resolution than your phone so it is more likely to be right.
Gosh, so the moment you use an if-statement, or an aggregate function (like sum or average), or weighting coefficients to mark some inputs as more significant than others, it's "AI" already? And I naïvely thought it was just, well, "computing". You could do "AI" on a 8086, ffs.
This is true of literally any software and if you really wanna oversimplify it, our brains are just a bunch of if statements (condition based logic) too...
no it IS more accurate. When i am off-roading i always record my track and have to unplug my phone from the trucks system to get an accurate un-smoothed track.
google maps does weird things but gaia just uses the raw GPS data from the phone and doesn't snap, however when you are plugged into carplay the phone seems to always consider the car/trucks data more accurate even when its clearly not.
this could very well my specific truck (dealer has refused to look and i don't have another to compare to) or a general tacoma thing but it both smooths the GPS data to make "nicer" looking lines and often introduces drift over time as likely some processing it does compounds an error
(i also realize i said the wrong phone, iphone 14 not 12 but even with the 12 it was notably better then the truck but the 14 pro has a much improved GPS and it shows)
AFAIK, and I could be wrong (though I did google this first), plugging your phone into CarPlay does not use the car’s gps unit. That’s just your phone trying to find a road because it’s connected to a car. Even if you are getting the car’s gps, it’s not going to give you raw values, but display values to show in an app, which should be smooth, IMHO.
But the in-car unit has both GPS (with the antenna being on the roof) as well as wheel speed. Noticeable in longer tunnels with traffic jams that make the speed vary. Then it's clear Google maps takes a random guess at where you are while the in-car system knows how far along you are.
the only time i am paying attention is when off-roading and recording a track, and then its very obvious when the GPS is doing a good or bad job and unplugged from carplay i get a far more accurate track.
Phones also use WiFi access points and some Bluetooth beacons to get a better location. AFAIK only Google and Apple have up-to-date maps of these that are useful for navigation, and no one else does (Mozilla threw the towel a year or two ago).
Cars can theoretically have better GPS antennae, and can do better dead reckoning using wheel position and wheel rotation speed. But do they? I haven’t seen any evidence that any car actually does better than a modern phone.
Especially inside a dense city, WiFi location can be much more precise than GPS.
i only really care about accurate when off-roading in the middle of nowhere with no reception and recording my track - my iphone performs far better when unplugged from the truck then when plugged into it.
That's possible too, but the issue I was thinking of wasn't exactly reception - it's that GPS signals bounce off buildings and so it looks like you're somewhere else. Stronger reception might actually make that worse.
Japan has local satellites to help with this (QZSS) and local cars may handle that better than global phones.
The Japanese navigation units in cars have been really good for at least 15 years. The signs and lane markings usually match exactly what’s ahead of you in real-life, and there’s a radio system on the highway gives traffic and road closure information even if you’re not connected to the internet. It’s only recently that smartphone apps are as good.
Phone navigation apps are surprisingly bad in Japan (Google ones in particular). Not unusable, but the in-car GPS is more competitive than in other markets IMHO.
Also with an aging population a phone screen is just too small for many.
BTW, to parent's point VW has been trying different approaches with a top mounted GPS/infotainment unit that can be omitted on cheaper trims.
That's not true. Google Maps, in particular, has by far the best route guidance. It used to be different - but not anymore. Most in-car systems don't even attempt to route the last 300m here because the detailed one-way street narrow layout of tiny streets isn't in their mapping data, or their algorithms are too weak. Google has mostly no problem with that.
Entering Japanese addresses IS tricky, though; here, custom-built Japanese solutions outshine. There are (mainly) no street names; instead, you specify your location by filtering down from Prefecture (Tokyo), City (Ota-ku), Commune (Kugahara), District (1-Chome), Block (26), House Number (1).
Japanese systems allow you to enter it this way - with Google (or, even worse, Apple Maps), it's a bit hacky. You would specify it as Kugahara 1-26-1 and hope for the best.
Google Maps fails in subtle but weird and sometimes costly ways.
On one side, it can't route through a bunch of valid paths. I first assumed it could be because of residents asking Google to cut traffic, but sometimes it's not even through residential areas. I see routes on the map that are avoided in favor of bigger loops, and when trying the shorter routes they're perfectly fine. Or perhaps it's the vehicle size and they optimize for SUVs ?
On the other side it will happily route you through paths that are restricted to specific categories of cars. It's up to the driver to carefully avoid them, but it really wants you to go through and reroutes you there when you deviate, so it's a huge PITA in areas you don't know and try to navigate while ignoring the navigation instructions. Cops seem to have noticed it, We've got fined the first time we fucked up, and now that I'm aware of the issue I see the cops in many of these spots basically waiting for the jackpot.
I notice that Google Maps does very poorly on my iPhone 13 Pro with the multi-level roads, like riding around in the tunnels under Tokyo or on the roads with highways above the local roads, whereas builtin navigation units usually have no problems with this. I also find their directions to be much harder to follow than the built-in navigation units when riding around the major roads where turning right requires you to exit to the left for instance. Also, Google Maps fails to provide the variety of route options with fine-grained toll-booth costs, that all navigation units I've used in the last 5 years have gotten spot-on.
The weird part is Maps will accept them for search, but not display the plus code except when looking at POI (randomly selecting a point on the map doesn't show it for me, I only could get that from the /pluscodes/ map)
This seems genuinely useful, but as usual we're having the chicken and egg problem to get it adopted ?
In mobile at least, you can touch and hold to make a red temporary POI that will show you the plus code.
But yeah, nobody uses it in the real World. If I need to share a point with someone else I'll just send them the Google Maps share URL instead, which has its own shortcode
> The Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS), also known as Michibiki (みちびき), is a four-satellite regional satellite navigation system and a satellite-based augmentation system developed by the Japanese government to enhance the United States-operated Global Positioning System (GPS) in the Asia-Oceania regions, with a focus on Japan.
...
> The primary purpose of QZSS is to increase the availability of GPS in Japan's numerous urban canyons, where only satellites at very high elevation can be seen. A secondary function is performance enhancement, increasing the accuracy and reliability of GPS derived navigation solutions. The Quasi-Zenith Satellites transmit signals compatible with the GPS L1C/A signal, as well as the modernized GPS L1C, L2C signal and L5 signals. This minimizes changes to existing GPS receivers.
That definitely does not match my experience. I was in Japan in December of 2022 and used my phone to get everywhere, the directions were extremely accurate, more-so than in my home town in the US.
That’s one reason I use CarPlay - the interface hasn’t changed for years. Apart from one really annoying change to Apple Maps when they replaced the “silence directions” toggle from a big square to a touch, wait, touch tiny icon interface.
Ironically, the nav unit I used on a rental car circa 2007-08 (birth of touchscreen smartphones) was exactly like the GP describes, a separate unit that had a mount like the modern smartphone variants.
