[nuccy]

Maybe Google Maps just didn't have enough data about that road or there was a jam on the highway. There are a lot of factors to consider and knobs to tune. In old days navigating software was just looking for a shortest possible way, which given that only main roads were known, was quite a reasonable algorithm. Nowadays all the main players have not just highways and city streets, but also trails and unpaved roads, traffic information, road danger (bad pavement, potholes), et al. There are quite funny accidents because of all these, e.g. I remember reading about Google Maps sending people via a muddy road where most of the cars stucked [1]

1. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/06/26/us/google-maps-detour-col...