While we're on the subject of maps-related bugs, I was recently borrowing a new Tesla Model Y and took it on a RORO ferry. After the crossing, the car’s GPS was convinced I was still at the port where I had departed from. I restarted it a couple of times, but nothing. I drove off using Waze on my phone instead of the car's navigation. The map on the car kept moving relative to the direction I was driving, so the navigation was showing me driving into the sea and eventually started complaining that it would be impossible to find a charger.
Approximately 5 hours later, just as I was about to arrive, the car finally managed to figure out my correct location.
Exciting trip, not a huge fan of Teslas, but their charger planning is really nice. It was very unpleasant to suddenly lose it.
I just genuinely wonder how such a bug can actually occur, surely you'd update the GPS fix more often than every couple of hours. Hard to imagine the car just suddenly couldn't get a GPS fix for hours either. But if it did somehow totally lose the ability to use GPS, the car must have a pretty good dead reckoning system given how well it was responding to my changes in direction.
On a vaguely related note, driving 3000 kilometers through Europe in an electric car was surprisingly nice. Certainly didn't affect the length of the trip nearly as much as I'd have expected, but it was certainly super annoying to try and figure out the optimal rate of travel on the Autobahn. Charging at Tesla's supercharges was vastly more expensive than I expected, the "fuel" costs weren't much lower than what you could easily reach with a diesel car.
stockresearcher 2 hours ago [-]
I had a Volvo XC90 that “jumped” off the interstate and onto a parallel mountain road east of Knoxville. It did its best to track along those roads and somehow made its way into North Carolina. But even when I was back in Chicago, it was still stuck in NC trying to find a way off those mountain roads. Dozens of on/off cycles did nothing. I disconnected the battery overnight and that didn’t work. At the next service appointment, the dealer had to do a full firmware reset to wipe the memory and get it working again.
It amazed me that Volvo programmed an SUV to disbelieve that it could ever actually leave a road.
doubled112 1 hours ago [-]
Last summer traveling down a rural road in southwestern Ontario, Apple maps told me to return to the route. We hadn't turned in 10 kilometers, but it was showing that we were 200 meters into a cornfield.
I don't think I could have ended up there if I tried in the Golf we were in. Nice try.
My kids thought it was the funniest thing, but it's a good technology lesson.
hnlmorg 1 hours ago [-]
The problem is that roads are continually being built and maps aren’t always as quick to be updated.
There are also private paths that aren’t public roads but are still intended for vehicles.
theamk 1 hours ago [-]
That's no excuse for disbelieving GPS for extended periods of time.
Google Maps gets it right: it tried to keep you on road, but only for a few tens of seconds. After that, if you are in the middle of uncharted territory, it'll show the marker there.
(This is probably because Google Maps can be used for walking/biking too)
UebVar 32 minutes ago [-]
>(This is probably because Google Maps can be used for walking/biking too)
Please don't do that. The map is simply not good enough and does not have enough context (road quality, terrain, trail difficulty) for anything but very causal activity. Even then I highly recommend to use a proper map, electronic or paper.
jonahrd 22 minutes ago [-]
yeah I'm not gonna open some paid trail map or buy a paper map so I can walk across my local city park and give my friends a pin to find me...
worewood 1 hours ago [-]
A badly programmed Kalman filter perhaps
kijin 2 hours ago [-]
My dad used to have a crappy aftermarket GPS in his car that did the same thing. It would get lost dozens of miles away, and then hundreds of miles away.
The explanation I found online at the time was that a GPS receiver needs to download data about the exact orbits of all GPS satellites from time to time. Satellites slowly lose altitude and change their orbits. Up-to-date information is constantly broadcasted by every satellite, but it takes about 15 minutes for a device on the ground to download this dataset.
Most GPS devices do this automatically whenever they get the chance. But if your GPS is somehow unable to stay online for 15 consecutive minutes (bad firmware, faulty memory, tunnels, underground parking lots, etc), it will be relying on increasingly outdated info and drift far off its actual location.
pbmonster 22 minutes ago [-]
There's no way a modern smart phone or car relies on those ephemeris transmissions. They all just get it from the internet, which takes less than a second. That's one of the reasons why a smart phone has a reliable GPS fix basically instantly after being booted up, while old-school offline GPS units needed minutes to get a fix.
bragr 2 hours ago [-]
My guess would be:
1. Car entered ferry, loses GPS
2. Car entered dead reconning mode used for tunnels and such
3. Car left ferry, acquired GPS
Then either:
4a. Location via dead reconning vasty disagreed with GPS because the car doesn't know about the ferry's movements, triggering some kind of failsafe.
Or:
4b. There's just a plain old bug in the condition to switch back to GPS and maybe people haven't noticed because you don't get as badly desynced in a tunnel.
>the car must have a pretty good dead reckoning system
Yeah all the pieces are there: accelerometers and gyros for stability control, compass for navigation, and the wheel speed sensors give you exact distance traveled.
toast0 19 minutes ago [-]
My local roro ferry drops you off pretty close to downtown. If you don't get a good fix as you get off the boat before you get into the urban canyon, satnav is pretty hopeless for a few minutes.
Doesn't usually take 5 hours to figure out where it is though. At least not on my vehicles, even the one that's always getting confused.
raverbashing 5 minutes ago [-]
It probably doesn't do dead reckoning even in tunnels
And maybe the system sucks to get the GPS almanac if badly desynced
somenameforme 1 hours ago [-]
A practical issue is that GPS can be spoofed relatively easily. If autonomous driving became a thing, and ubiquitous, with vehicles that prioritized remote over local consistency, then a single GPS spoof could cause some interesting things to happen. This is probably a concern that does drive decisions, at least to a degree. It creates a weird scenario where you kind of need to trust GPS, but you simultaneously also can't treat it as authoritative.
OTOH creating a dumb user experience for a fairly common scenario, to try to preempt a hypothetical scenario is probably not a great idea. A fun problem to think about, though it may be completely unrelated to this issue.
pjsg 53 minutes ago [-]
I suspect that my Tesla adjusts its location based on dead reckoning after losing GPS lock except that it assumes that I'm driving forwards. I.e. If I reverse out of my garage, then the map ends up in the wrong place and now I'm driving parallel to the road!
jwr 36 minutes ago [-]
> On a vaguely related note, driving 3000 kilometers through Europe in an electric car was surprisingly nice.
Having done a number of multiple-thousand km trips in Europe in an EV (not a Tesla, nobody buys those anymore) — it's amusing how non-EV muggles think this is somehow an ordeal. It's just fine! There are drawbacks: you do have to use your brain and plan ahead more than you do when burning dinosaurs. But I found that the 20-30 minute stops every 2h really improve how I feel after a day or two of driving.
Agreed about prices: there is gouging going on with some crazy margins. When charging at home, an EV is 2-4x less expensive per km than a gasoline-powered car, but when fast-charging on a road trip the cost of energy is nearly the same.
SoftTalker 7 minutes ago [-]
Keep up the gaslighting about how 20-30 minute stops every couple of hours makes a long drive "nicer." I just want to get where I'm going. I don't need to pee every two hours, and it doesnt take me 20 minutes to do it even if I did.
GP said it was "very unpleasant" to lose the charge planning. Something I never worry about in my regular car.
tgsovlerkhgsel 44 minutes ago [-]
As you're mentioning a RO/RO ferry, recently, and Europe... are you sure you weren't in a GPS-denied environment, where the car (correctly) detected that GPS was jammed or spoofed and ignored it?
jonathan7977 21 minutes ago [-]
One hypothesis I can offer is that your car could not, for whatever reason, use assisted gps to download the almanach which relies on mobile networks. Gps devices that download the almanac via gps itself can take up to twelve hours (in higher latitudes i think)!
roywiggins 2 hours ago [-]
Possibly it was using WPS keyed to the ferry's WiFi and didn't consider the possibility that the ferry itself could move out of where it was registered (ie, the port)?
monerozcash 2 hours ago [-]
I drove away from the ferry and passed lots of WiFi APs on the way, presumably it should have figured out the new location pretty quick with WPS.
kijin 29 minutes ago [-]
Perhaps the car is programmed to ignore all external signals for a while if it detects significant disagreement for a prolonged time, as might have happened if it had access to both WPS and GPS during the ferry ride. In such cases it would be safe to assume that something is being spoofed, and fall back to INS.
Liftyee 2 hours ago [-]
I wonder if it's using a compass and odometry (distance) with dead reckoning. A strange choice when GPS is available, but it would account for the map moving in the car's direction and it not changing locations when it moved without rolling (ferry).
billyjmc 2 hours ago [-]
Almost certainly. GPS is not only easily jammed, but easily spoofed. If the car believed GPS instead of its own eyes, so to speak, then there’s significant potential that you’d see glitches more often. It could also be something of a safety risk when using its self-driving capabilities.
bragr 1 hours ago [-]
In addition to sibling's comments about jamming and self driving safety, there are many driving situations where there is no or poor GPS reception: tunnels, double deck bridges, double deck freeways, underpasses, urban canyons, actual canyons, etc. Also regional problems. The GPS constellation is in a 55° inclination, so if you are north of ~55N, or south of ~55S, you need a clear view of the southern/northern sky, respectfully, for reception, since there will be no overhead satellites.
kbutler 1 hours ago [-]
Looks like others have reported similar issues. Entering a navigation route may help?
I remember cars in the early 2000's doing this. Haven't seen that behavior in years.
hdgvhicv 3 hours ago [-]
Directions suggest an average speed over 500 mph. Not bad for driving.
zkmon 3 hours ago [-]
Actual distance about 3.2k miles plus equator length of 25k miles plus what else?
throwaway290 2 hours ago [-]
Altitude
derriz 44 minutes ago [-]
The most annoying thing about iPhone Maps for me is the inaccuracy of the direction indicator. I've googled and it doesn't seem to be a universal complaint even though I've experienced this on multiple devices over the years even after following instructions to re-calibrate multiple times. Maybe I've just been unlucky.
It intensely frustrating to use maps for direction finding while walking or cycling when the app is telling you are facing one direction when in fact you are facing another.
morshu9001 37 minutes ago [-]
On my past iPhones, the compass always got screwed up over time somehow. Sometimes recalibrating fixed it, but only for a minute.
mertd 38 minutes ago [-]
That's a phone compass problem no? Perhaps the specific way you're holding the phone is confusing for the algorithm?
holditright 18 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
websiteapi 3 hours ago [-]
Oh wow, a bug
sva_ 2 hours ago [-]
In Apple Maps? Unpossible!
MiscIdeaMaker99 3 hours ago [-]
Except this one is not on the windshield.
amelius 2 hours ago [-]
Loved the comment about the fractal shaped path.
MiscIdeaMaker99 3 hours ago [-]
Looks like a bug that I hope someone will have a fun time fixing.
srean 2 hours ago [-]
You wouldn't imagine ...
I have seen API calls you people wouldn’t believe.
Requests hanging off the edge of the load balancer,
Ethernet tubes glittering in the dark.
Latency logs reporting some API calls that took longer than the age of the universe.
Their means and percentiles burning on the shoulders of weekly reports.
Plot points dying at the edge of y axis
... like tears in the rain.
Angostura 47 minutes ago [-]
Time to reboot
srean 12 minutes ago [-]
Indeed and Voigt-Kampf the signed from the unsigned, dynamic types from static.
rebolek 2 hours ago [-]
Fixing bugs. At Apple. OK.
nashashmi 3 hours ago [-]
I think the developers didn’t account for lost AirTags many hundreds of miles away. And that long calculation was not the best.
1317 3 hours ago [-]
context?
mapmeld 46 minutes ago [-]
I went back to their posts in November for this
> One of my AirTags is inexplicably 1600 miles away in Texas. It's one of my floating ones that I throw into bags when traveling as needed.
> Maybe it dropped out of my bag only to be found by someone who thought it'd be fun to confuse the owner. Or maybe it became e-waste to be dumped in another country.
37 minutes ago [-]
Etheryte 3 hours ago [-]
The distance is more than the circumference of the Earth. If you wrapped a rope around the planet at the equator, the length would be around 25k miles.
lxgr 52 minutes ago [-]
Some roads aren’t perfectly straight (not that this seems like it could explain what happened in this particular case).
reliabilityguy 2 hours ago [-]
Sure. However, if the road around the planet goes to Everest and back, the total length of travel will exceed the circumference of the planet.
Daneel_ 3 hours ago [-]
Seems like the author of the linked post has a lost airtag located in the abyss.
numbsafari 3 hours ago [-]
It’s sitting next to Apple’s values.
JanNash 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
speedgoose 1 hours ago [-]
48 137 km.
rzzzt 58 minutes ago [-]
1.2 times the circumference of the Earth. Is space compressed between SF and Guatemala City somehow?
pushedx 3 hours ago [-]
It is easily 29,905 road miles away.
If you put all of your blood vessels end to end they would go to the moon and back.
handsclean 2 hours ago [-]
The flight distance is 2,520 miles, Google puts road distance at 3,179 mi = 1.26x, 29,905 mi is 11.87x. Road miles are not even close to accounting for it, it’s just a bug.
hyperpape 3 hours ago [-]
Being a little bit clever can lead you to make some pretty bad mistakes.
Yes, the distance according to roads can be different from the distance as the crow flies. No, it cannot realistically be 10x the distance when the crow's distance is 2500 miles.
meindnoch 1 hours ago [-]
But what if you count the distance of going in and out of each tiny crack on the road surface?
scrame 50 minutes ago [-]
Look up "fractal dimensions".
Y_Y 2 hours ago [-]
> If you put all of your blood vessels end to end they would go to the moon and back.
The moon orbits too quickly to make this practical
jb1991 2 hours ago [-]
I question your use of the word “easily”.
thfuran 3 hours ago [-]
You would have to take an implausible number of wrong turns to have a chance of making it anywhere near that long a drive. For an example of a shorter but still entirely unreasonable path: Head straight north all the way to the pole, continue south to the pole, continue north to the latitude of the destination, then head due east until arrival.
lugao 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe the OP should read about fractals before posting a pedantic message about fermi questions.
thfuran 2 hours ago [-]
Are you saying that you think Apple Maps is directing him to drive along a fractal instead of a road?
rvnx 2 hours ago [-]
Not many people know about it but the world is an illusion, it is believed to be based on PS1 triangles so you have to count the edges thrice. Prove me wrong.
mjd 2 hours ago [-]
The path taken did not traverse the boundary of every atom along the way, or even every grain of sand.
Even if it had, the airtag location service is not accurate enough to have detected that.
lugao 1 hours ago [-]
Not really, if you had every grain of sand in the way it would diverge to a much bigger value. The problem is that the roads have >1 dimension at that scale, apple maps is definitely adding up to many details along the way, it's not a straight line and it ends up being 10x the actual distance. No Biggie.
The "fix" is to smooth those details as the straight line distance grows bigger.
lupire 25 minutes ago [-]
Google "Dan Piponi", then sit down and think about what you've done.
Rendered at 16:54:55 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Approximately 5 hours later, just as I was about to arrive, the car finally managed to figure out my correct location.
Exciting trip, not a huge fan of Teslas, but their charger planning is really nice. It was very unpleasant to suddenly lose it.
I just genuinely wonder how such a bug can actually occur, surely you'd update the GPS fix more often than every couple of hours. Hard to imagine the car just suddenly couldn't get a GPS fix for hours either. But if it did somehow totally lose the ability to use GPS, the car must have a pretty good dead reckoning system given how well it was responding to my changes in direction.
On a vaguely related note, driving 3000 kilometers through Europe in an electric car was surprisingly nice. Certainly didn't affect the length of the trip nearly as much as I'd have expected, but it was certainly super annoying to try and figure out the optimal rate of travel on the Autobahn. Charging at Tesla's supercharges was vastly more expensive than I expected, the "fuel" costs weren't much lower than what you could easily reach with a diesel car.
It amazed me that Volvo programmed an SUV to disbelieve that it could ever actually leave a road.
I don't think I could have ended up there if I tried in the Golf we were in. Nice try.
My kids thought it was the funniest thing, but it's a good technology lesson.
There are also private paths that aren’t public roads but are still intended for vehicles.
Google Maps gets it right: it tried to keep you on road, but only for a few tens of seconds. After that, if you are in the middle of uncharted territory, it'll show the marker there.
(This is probably because Google Maps can be used for walking/biking too)
Please don't do that. The map is simply not good enough and does not have enough context (road quality, terrain, trail difficulty) for anything but very causal activity. Even then I highly recommend to use a proper map, electronic or paper.
The explanation I found online at the time was that a GPS receiver needs to download data about the exact orbits of all GPS satellites from time to time. Satellites slowly lose altitude and change their orbits. Up-to-date information is constantly broadcasted by every satellite, but it takes about 15 minutes for a device on the ground to download this dataset.
Most GPS devices do this automatically whenever they get the chance. But if your GPS is somehow unable to stay online for 15 consecutive minutes (bad firmware, faulty memory, tunnels, underground parking lots, etc), it will be relying on increasingly outdated info and drift far off its actual location.
1. Car entered ferry, loses GPS
2. Car entered dead reconning mode used for tunnels and such
3. Car left ferry, acquired GPS
Then either:
4a. Location via dead reconning vasty disagreed with GPS because the car doesn't know about the ferry's movements, triggering some kind of failsafe.
Or:
4b. There's just a plain old bug in the condition to switch back to GPS and maybe people haven't noticed because you don't get as badly desynced in a tunnel.
>the car must have a pretty good dead reckoning system
Yeah all the pieces are there: accelerometers and gyros for stability control, compass for navigation, and the wheel speed sensors give you exact distance traveled.
Doesn't usually take 5 hours to figure out where it is though. At least not on my vehicles, even the one that's always getting confused.
And maybe the system sucks to get the GPS almanac if badly desynced
OTOH creating a dumb user experience for a fairly common scenario, to try to preempt a hypothetical scenario is probably not a great idea. A fun problem to think about, though it may be completely unrelated to this issue.
Having done a number of multiple-thousand km trips in Europe in an EV (not a Tesla, nobody buys those anymore) — it's amusing how non-EV muggles think this is somehow an ordeal. It's just fine! There are drawbacks: you do have to use your brain and plan ahead more than you do when burning dinosaurs. But I found that the 20-30 minute stops every 2h really improve how I feel after a day or two of driving.
Agreed about prices: there is gouging going on with some crazy margins. When charging at home, an EV is 2-4x less expensive per km than a gasoline-powered car, but when fast-charging on a road trip the cost of energy is nearly the same.
GP said it was "very unpleasant" to lose the charge planning. Something I never worry about in my regular car.
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/map-location-and-rou...
It intensely frustrating to use maps for direction finding while walking or cycling when the app is telling you are facing one direction when in fact you are facing another.
I have seen API calls you people wouldn’t believe.
Requests hanging off the edge of the load balancer, Ethernet tubes glittering in the dark.
Latency logs reporting some API calls that took longer than the age of the universe.
Their means and percentiles burning on the shoulders of weekly reports.
Plot points dying at the edge of y axis
... like tears in the rain.
> One of my AirTags is inexplicably 1600 miles away in Texas. It's one of my floating ones that I throw into bags when traveling as needed.
> Maybe it dropped out of my bag only to be found by someone who thought it'd be fun to confuse the owner. Or maybe it became e-waste to be dumped in another country.
If you put all of your blood vessels end to end they would go to the moon and back.
Yes, the distance according to roads can be different from the distance as the crow flies. No, it cannot realistically be 10x the distance when the crow's distance is 2500 miles.
The moon orbits too quickly to make this practical
Even if it had, the airtag location service is not accurate enough to have detected that.
The "fix" is to smooth those details as the straight line distance grows bigger.