Do you have to buy DVD discs for it? How much are they these days? I got one map update on an SD card for the Focus for free a year after I bought the car and then they wanted to charge me $200 a year after that, to which I declined.

Yes I bought the very last DVD map iteration for the Mk IV? BMW nav. They are not going to make any more updated DVD's. It is all downhill from here.

Its only one DVD compared to I don't know how many disks the prior model CD version used.

Haha.

But more seriously, that's one of the reasons that Elon is not using GPS guidance for auto pilot. Identification of "drivable space" will always be determined visually.

I'm not saying it can't still suck, but it wouldn't keep driving just because a map told it to... Assuming it's visual recognition capabilities was better than those morons.

They are different issues... BUT... of course self-driving (as picking a route) depends on GPS on a higher level. And just google or a human for that matter could have picked a detour that was not a road, so could a GPS/FSD, "Elon"'s prowess notwithstanding. Now if that FSD is good enough, as that detour deteriorates, it will have to make a call, the road condition is getting poorer, what to do? I bet in this case, it wasn't so binary, which is why plenty of humans got stuck, you could go for a little bit on a dirt road. This is an edge case hard for humans, and will be hard for FSD/GPS (one isn't independent of the other).

Yep. Well said.

Yep, bad google maps clearly affects humans too. I've had waze try to route me onto private roads and driveways multiple times. It's pretty annoying, but overall those apps are fantastic so I'll give them some leash.

Another issue I've seen very few people talk about is what it does to small back streets when there's a traffic jam. The other day I was stuck in a giant clusterfuck at the GW bridge. Waze eventually floods all the little side streets in the town with gridlocked cars. When one street fills up with stopped cars, it starts routing people one more block over until that one is clogged up too. And it keeps repeating.

Of course there's nothing preventing some people from driving those streets even without waze, but traffic-aware routing essentially guarantees that the entire grid of side streets becomes gridlocked every time the bridge backs up. The people who live there must be pissed.

I wonder if this will somehow be addressed through regulation... or goodwill from the google overlords. "Gridlocking an entire town is not a valid global routing strategy"

Ha - Google is like an automated Chris Christie

There have been tons of local media stories about urban and suburban neighborhoods fed up with Waze and other nav apps routing people through their neighborhoods and the different actions they've taken to try to make it stop...sometimes successfully, but more often making things worse.

:dunno:

How do you fix that problem? Also :dunno: but there should be more than one way to get there. To make things work best, you probably need more/better metadata about each block of each road and some kind of cooperative load balancing within single apps and across all the major ones to recognize congestion and start routing traffic through/around it in ways that cause the least amount of additional hassle or jsut moving congestion, routing traffic through areas ill equipped to handle it, etc.

"Time for some traffic in Fort Lee" ended a political career. :lol:

Matt, you make a very good and fair point. I wonder how many of those stuck in the jam you were in, thought about the other side of the coin as you are doing.

I live in Weehawken and while my dead-end is (largely) unscathed, one block away the traffic of Lincoln Tunnel and the waze/google/other gps/traffic reroutes are wreaking havoc. Plenty of towns around here limit certain streets at certain hours to those with resident permits; but that requires hiring and paying for extra traffic cops.

Lots of things they could do, if they wanted. Off the top of my head:

For a start, identify roads that are "not intended for thru traffic".

And either exclude them from routes that pass through, or limit the traffic that you send them (one car per... blah).

And don't route traffic onto them if the goal is to simply get ahead of people stuck in the same traffic jam you are. (it's different if the side road circumvents the road block itself (accident, etc))

...