The car screen now draws the phone's map

Plug the phone into CarPlay or Android Auto and the car screen used to show a map of its own. The route was a thick white line. The basemap ignored your language, POI choices and night mode. The turn arrows on Apple's card were not quite the ones on the phone. As of today the car draws the same map as the phone, and the vehicle marker behaves the way Google Maps taught everyone to expect.

One route line

The white line was an accident: the car borrowed the Selection highlight setting, which exists to highlight a track you tap. The route is now the phone's blue line on both screens, with a dark edge and round ends so it stays readable on a sunlit head unit and over satellite imagery. Plan previews are blue too, and rain or storm stretches ahead are painted on the route in the car as on the phone.

One map

The car now loads exactly the style the phone loads: your server, label language, POI categories, badge density and, without signal, your offline map. With the Adventure theme on Auto, the car switches to night when the car does (usually with the headlights), even while the phone is still in day mode. Navigation opens flat like on the phone, and the zoom, vehicle marker and speed-limit sign are the phone's sizes scaled to the car screen.

The same symbols, including the cluster

Turn arrows use the phone's colours: teal for left, orange for right. Apple's maneuver card, which also feeds the instrument cluster and the dashboard, now shows the phone's roundabout symbol: the real exit direction and the exit number, not one generic icon. Within 2 km of a junction it also shows the lanes, with yours lit. What the car is told a maneuver is now matches the picture: motorway exits, merges and roundabout exit angles were all being described slightly wrong to the cluster. Fuel, camping and beach results from the Services page appear as the phone's round badges.

Checking the roundabout symbol turned up a bug on the phone as well. The small chevron that shows the direction of travel around a roundabout was computed in a way that depended on where on Earth the roundabout is. In Bergen, four of five roundabouts pointed the wrong way. That is fixed on both screens.

A marker that knows which way you face

While you are stopped or crawling, the vehicle marker now points where the phone's compass says you are facing, corrected for a phone mounted in landscape. Once you are moving it follows the road, because a compass on a handlebar or in a dashboard cradle is disturbed by the vehicle's metal. A translucent blue circle around the marker shows how accurate your GPS position is. With a good fix it hides under the marker; in a tunnel exit, a deep valley or between tall buildings it grows, so a marker that is only approximately right looks approximate.

Android Auto gets all of this through the same code; its own check on a head unit is next.