NAV doesn't know where the car is.

[daniel]

Just picked up my car at the port and drove home. NAV thought I was way far away and driving crosswise through streets and buildings. Anybody got any idea what's going on? Thanks.

First-production Model 3, not using the latest firmware because it came through while the car was in transit and I didn't want to wait the 45 minutes before driving home. I told the car to install it this evening.

 

[Tam]

...NAV thought I was way far away and driving crosswise through streets and buildings...

The first rule of thumb is when in doubt, just do a reboot!

 

[RTPEV]

I think this is normal. It took my car a few hours to realize it wasn't at the railyards in Alabama where east coast Model 3's were unloaded off trains. They must have put the Model 3 into some special mode for shipment and it takes some time for it to get its GPS bearings.

It is common for GPS receivers to take a lot longer to get a location fix when they haven't been on in awhile. This is because GPS works by knowing the exact position in orbit of each of the GPS satellites it receives signals from, and because satellites orbits change slowly over time, the orbital data gets "stale" and the GPS receiver won't give you a reading until it's had a chance to download current GPS orbital data.

Still, this process USUALLY only takes about 5 minutes max, so I can't explain why the car would take significantly longer, so there must be a different explanation. But my advice is to just wait a little while (I can't remember how long it took my car, but I seem to recall it was more than an hour).

 

[ewoodrick]

In urban areas with big buildings, GPS reception is problematic. Also add that since GPS is less accurate than most people think, GPSs have a pin to feature that pins you on a specific street. With close spaced parallel streets, this is a common experience

 

[daniel]

Thanks everybody for the replies. The last place the car knew where it was, was in Seattle. So when I picked it up in Kahului, it was about 2,600 miles from its last-known location. It seemed to be off by a fairly small amount, just a few hundred feet out to sea. As I drove the 25 minutes home, it seemed to get much farther off. I parked in my garage, did some stuff around the house, and then when I went out again it was right on the button. I never even got around to trying a re-boot. So I guess it just took a while because it had travelled so far.

I am sooooooooooooo happy to have the car again. Tomorrow or the next day I'll take the Prius to CarMax. I don't need it any more.

 

[daniel]

P.S. I don't know why I thought there was a CarMax here. Apparently there's not. Okay, gotta find some place else to sell the Prius.

 

[Grossie]

My model S does this once in a while, although not in the last couple of months. I'll be driving around and it will show me as being off the street by a few feet, then sometimes it thinks I'm driving through back yards and occasionally into lake Michigan. It was really bad for a while, but recently it's right on the money. I think it's a sensor issue, the best I can figure is that it only goes to the actual GPS data periodically, otherwise it relies on movement sensors (might be complete fabrication). I think I have a faulty GPS sensor that refuses to kick in when asked. I'm too lazy to go get it fixed, it hasn't caused me any real problems to date, except that sometimes I have to manually trigger the garage door because my car thinks I'm somewhere else (I can't imagine having to live with that kind of hardship full time!) My lease is almost up (which is why I'm lurking here), but if I owned the car I'd go get it fixed.
Reboots work temporarily for me. I've tried soft and hard reboots with no real long term success.