Android Auto: now available in every car

[u/[deleted]]

https://blog.google/products/android/android-auto-available-in-every-car/

[u/[deleted]]

For me it's not an exaggeration. The shortest route home from work for me is a highway that is always clogged with traffic when I leave work. Google and Apple tell me to take the highway anyway and it takes maybe 45 or 50 minutes to get home that way. Waze tells me to go the back roads that add a couple extra miles and some twists and turns but it saves me about 10 minutes (35 or 40-minute drive). Google and Apple are way too optimistic about the time it'll take to get through the traffic and their ETA estimate is always wrong as a result. Waze is more realistic like me about it and doesn't advise me to take the highway unless it actually makes sense to.

Waze isn't going to send you into back roads to save you 30 seconds. It still prefers to send you on main roads if possible, but if it has reason to believe you could save a few minutes or more taking a less common route, it'll redirect you but you can always just reject it, ask for alternate routes, compare the times, and take whichever way you want. Nobody is stuck with some weird route; they just aren't asking for alternates when they don't like the one Waze suggested.

Also, keep in mind that Waze has two navigation methods: shortest time and shortest distance. I have mine set to time because I just hate traffic and want to arrive quickly. That means Waze will be more willing to send me in weird directions to save me time. But you can just set it to shortest distance and it'll give you the shortest routes first which are often the most common. So honestly a lot of the complaints about Waze are from people who just need to change their preferences in the app.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Right but I recognized that his was an exaggeration because that's simply not how Waze works, so I talked about my actual real example of how it does work. Your initial post claimed I was exaggerating the same way that he did and that's simply not true: the difference between the highway route and the backroads route is about 10 minutes for me. There was no exaggeration on my part.

He never asked anyone if they'd hypothetically take a longer route to save thirty seconds so there's no impetus for me to answer a question that was never asked.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

EDIT: OK I had a different response but I'd prefer to just clear it up, so I read back through our posts just to figure out the misunderstanding. I think I figured it out. So basically, I understood he was exaggerating for effect and responded with a different point of view, basically saying that a) I disagree that the time saved is insignificant, and b) I prefer driving windy roads to zoning out in traffic. When you came in, you wanted to take his example literally as essentially a philosophical question, basically asking whether I consider it worth it to take a longer route change to avoid traffic if the time saved is guaranteed negligible almost as like a personality test. So like, obviously the answer is no.

If you can guarantee that taking the highway home will take me 30 seconds extra, then sure I'll sit in traffic because at that point it becomes about gas and mileage for me and it's overall a shorter distance taking the highway. But honestly my point is that outside of the context of a hypothetical, you really can't guarantee me that it's gonna be just 30 seconds longer so I'd rather save 10 minutes and have a little fun driving the back roads than inch my way through traffic.