CarPlay oddities

[Anonymouse]

Tried a generated scenic route using CarPlay in my Porsche. Overall the new app experience was excellent; the route was excellent; and the new “controller” interface for those who can mount their phone separately from the car screen is also useful.

A few odd things:

• bigger than expected difference between beta routeplanner’s duration estimate (1h29) and the estimate I got when I started navigating (2h15 inc 18 min traffic, ie 1h57). What causes such a big divergence? (Actual duration when driven: about 2h 10 with little traffic).

• mid journey the duration suddenly leapt to over 4h, including 2h of traffic. This was completely phantom - there was no 2h traffic jam

• when I pulled over to look I saw that it had also invented a series of seasonal road closures which don’t exist as far as I know (this is southern England between Hungerford and Inklen, not the alps). Bizarrely, it had allocated 11 minutes delay to each point. (this still didn’t add up to 2 hours jam either). As I drove the route these disappeared again, and there was a course also no closure or delay - eventually the estimate returned to normal.
  

• I tried to check for enabling seasonal closures on the planning website, but can’t find how to turn that on in the beta - . it’s not in “Routing Settings“ where I would expect it. There is also no mention of “season“ when I search the beta manual.

• at one point the whole of CarPlay stopped working (disappeared from the car altogether) require a complete reconnection of the phone.. This was all of CarPlay, not just the app, so I suspect it was a Porsche bug.

• I see to remember there was a facility to take photos with the app so they are added at the place you are on the map. However, I can’t work out where the user interface control to do this is.

Overall and excellent route, but still some quirks that make things difficult, especially if you set out for an appointment and are keeping an eye on duration!

This was the route (the new route image download feature is GREAT!)

[Corjan Meijerink]

Thanks for this, glad the route and the controller view worked well in the Porsche!

On the odd bits:

• The jump to over 4 hours and the "seasonal closures" came from the app, not from real traffic. Out on those lanes the app most likely lost signal for a moment and recalculated the route offline. Offline, the map data gives some small roads a large time penalty, and the app showed those as seasonal closures with an estimated delay each. Once you had signal again it recalculated online and they were gone. We've changed this in the next app update: a route calculated offline leaves that penalty out of your remaining time and arrival, and such a road only gets a quiet "may be closed at times" marker, without an invented delay.
• The difference between the planner (1h29) and navigation (2h15): they estimate differently, and navigation was the more accurate one (your 2h10 matched it).
• The road closures option is "Ignore road closures" under Routing settings. It only appears for the HERE and TomTom engines, and a generated scenic route uses a different engine, so you didn't see it there.
• CarPlay disappearing completely, as you say, sounds like the car rather than the app.
• Photos on the map: start recording a tracklog, then open the recording sheet. The camera button there adds the photo at your position on the ride.

Thanks again for the detailed write-up, it helped us find the cause straight away.