racekarl
Well-Known Member
- Thread starter
- #1
Been living with Google Maps for about a week, using it as often as I can for both trips I am familiar with as well as journeys to new places over new routes. So far my initial impression is that it has not yet shown itself to be meaningfully improved over MapBox for my uses.
The good:
- Much denser and richer POI data. I have not really had much use for this since I haven't yet encountered a situation where I would want to use it, but it's clearly better than what we had previously.
- Presumably better traffic data. GM rerouted me on my commute home last night, but traffic was so unusually heavy that I suspect MapBox would have figured it out, too. Not much personal experience with this, but given the much larger data set (GM includes Waze user data, too) it has to be better.
The bad:
- Routing does not seem much better, and in my anecdotal experience is actually worse. Over the past week Google Maps has:
- The map colors are not as attractive and do not blend as well with the Rivian UI as MapBox did.
- It can't seem to draw curves. Turns in the road look like they are built out of adjoining straight sections. Cloverleafs look like dodecahedrons. Particularly noticeable when it zooms in to make a turn.
- The navigation path sometimes differs from the road outline (the blue line drifts off the side of the road outline below).
- Adjoining road sections sometimes do not line up, leaving little jagged edges or weird discontinuities in the road shape.
- I know this one is on Rivian and not Google, but the new larger directions box sometimes cuts off text or shapes. For example: state routes in my area are shown as numbers inside a pill shape, and the bottom of the pill outline is often cut off.
The good:
- Much denser and richer POI data. I have not really had much use for this since I haven't yet encountered a situation where I would want to use it, but it's clearly better than what we had previously.
- Presumably better traffic data. GM rerouted me on my commute home last night, but traffic was so unusually heavy that I suspect MapBox would have figured it out, too. Not much personal experience with this, but given the much larger data set (GM includes Waze user data, too) it has to be better.
The bad:
- Routing does not seem much better, and in my anecdotal experience is actually worse. Over the past week Google Maps has:
- Directed me on a route that required an illegal turn.
- Routed me around the two sides of a square path rather than the much more obviously direct route that cuts diagonally across, and is a larger road, to boot. I ended up overriding the nav and taking the direct route and there was no reason to have avoided it. It's done it more than once so it seems like their road weighting data is off in that area.
- Speed limit data does not seem to be as accurate, at least in my area.
The ugly:- The map colors are not as attractive and do not blend as well with the Rivian UI as MapBox did.
- It can't seem to draw curves. Turns in the road look like they are built out of adjoining straight sections. Cloverleafs look like dodecahedrons. Particularly noticeable when it zooms in to make a turn.
- The navigation path sometimes differs from the road outline (the blue line drifts off the side of the road outline below).
- Adjoining road sections sometimes do not line up, leaving little jagged edges or weird discontinuities in the road shape.
- I know this one is on Rivian and not Google, but the new larger directions box sometimes cuts off text or shapes. For example: state routes in my area are shown as numbers inside a pill shape, and the bottom of the pill outline is often cut off.
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