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by Xylakant 3067 days ago
I have a host of issues with google maps. The routing and the maps itself are certainly great, but I have my phones language set to English and it attempts to use English pronounciation for all road names. In germany, this makes for a moderately hilarious guessing game (what street would that be), but when I cross over to Poland, things get unbearable. Every time you get into a tunnel, the phone looses the GPS fix, making routing in tunnels worthless. There’s a few places in Berlin where you need to take an on/off ramp in a tunnel or right at the end and a built in Navi reliably routes you, but a map on the phone cannot. It doesn’t work in regions without good cellular connectivity either.
1 comments

> The routing and the maps itself are certainly great

Depends on your location. In my whereabouts, Google Maps routinely routes to "shortcuts" on dirt roads. They seem to use 70km/h legal limit for those roads. Thankyouverymuch, but I'll take next exit, do 10km extra and take fully paved route...

Whatever algorithm they use is sometimes a bit too greedy. There have been times where I've been able to manually drag my path to another freeway and make it faster
What is weird, they even don't follow easiest to calculate path. Let's say there's an officially signed route following top-tier highways. Nope, it's suggesting a random dirt road. I'm pretty sure it'd be easier to hardcode the "official" routes and then check alternatives whenever there's a problem (crash, slow traffic, etc) on it. Nope, "official" one is all green and no constructions and crashes. Yet it's still suggesting the random dirt route :/
In southern California, I've had Google Maps take me along roads that gradually turned from pavement to gravel to dirt and then deep sand. Dirt road navigation isn't unusual where I was, so going forward made sense. But once I ended up in sand before I could find a safe place to turns around and got a "Transmission overheat" warning message on my dashboard. Thanks, Google!