Welcome to Tesla Motors Club
Discuss Tesla's Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, Cybertruck, Roadster and More.
Register

Sat Nav Useless

This site may earn commission on affiliate links.
Sorry if this has been covered before. Am interested to know other owners thoughts, my M3 sat nav is excessively unreliable to the extent we now don’t use it and use our phones. Went on a journey yesterday that I sort of knew the route, it tried to take me all over the place it tried to take me though a local village that had a bypass built around it 15 year ago it told me to make turns that were meant to be taken 500 yards earlier you begin to think that it’s your fault you haven't set it correctly or something but the fault is definitely there because many times now it has told me to take let’s say the 3rd exit at the roundabout and it’s clearly the 2nd or 4th exit we need to take, we have now tried this against our phone sat nav and the Tesla is giving the wrong information. Your thoughts and experiences would be appreciated.
 
Sorry if this has been covered before. Am interested to know other owners thoughts, my M3 sat nav is excessively unreliable to the extent we now don’t use it and use our phones. Went on a journey yesterday that I sort of knew the route, it tried to take me all over the place it tried to take me though a local village that had a bypass built around it 15 year ago it told me to make turns that were meant to be taken 500 yards earlier you begin to think that it’s your fault you haven't set it correctly or something but the fault is definitely there because many times now it has told me to take let’s say the 3rd exit at the roundabout and it’s clearly the 2nd or 4th exit we need to take, we have now tried this against our phone sat nav and the Tesla is giving the wrong information. Your thoughts and experiences would be appreciated.

Not been my experience but I doubt I have been on that bit of road!

I wonder if there is any chance that you have an old map release? What was the village-with-bypass? we could check if our maps are showing a bypass (maybe yours does, but SatNav just didn't take it?)

Any chance that "Traffic" indicated that the bypass was blocked?

But all that said I use Phone for Nav as Waze has much better Traffic, and Hazard warning for Police, Broken down cars, Potholes etc., I just use Car Satnav for a nice big on-screen map, and let it re-route to match Waze when Waze tells me to go a different way.
 
I am not a techy but my 13year old is and he has used google maps and something called wase, even the wife who never ever agrees with me says the sat nav is rubbish. Yesterday if we had taken the exit at the roundabout it had told us we would have ended up in a housing estate when clearly we needed to keep on the main road, it even took us onto a side/private road that led to a quarry. I to though it was meant to be the same as google maps but it defiantly is not as reliable as google maps
 
The mapping service is Google maps, but Tesla still uses it's own map data and the navigation system itself is a proprietary one, not google. So it only "looks" like google, but it's not really google.
I.e. the road can be there but if tesla's navigation system is not aware of it, it will ignore it.
 
  • Informative
Reactions: Lasairfion
Sorry if this has been covered before. Am interested to know other owners thoughts, my M3 sat nav is excessively unreliable to the extent we now don’t use it and use our phones. Went on a journey yesterday that I sort of knew the route, it tried to take me all over the place it tried to take me though a local village that had a bypass built around it 15 year ago it told me to make turns that were meant to be taken 500 yards earlier you begin to think that it’s your fault you haven't set it correctly or something but the fault is definitely there because many times now it has told me to take let’s say the 3rd exit at the roundabout and it’s clearly the 2nd or 4th exit we need to take, we have now tried this against our phone sat nav and the Tesla is giving the wrong information. Your thoughts and experiences would be appreciated.

Yes same experience being told to go 2nd exit when its clearly the 3rd exit also very random routes that were unnecessary ie instead of going right at a roundabout it takes me straight over then go down two streets back to the same road it would have taken me if I had gone right....

Not sure what's going on buy might have to use Waze as well
 
And there was me hoping Tesla nav would be an improvement on my Audi nav, which regularly misses routes. I thought Tesla was google map based therefore always up to date? Was looking forward to that.

Although nothing will ever be worse than the nav I had on my previous Discovery Sport which I’m convinced was set up to use off road, single track roads and anything else to use LR’s off roading skills. If there was a complicated route, it would use it.
 
  • Funny
  • Like
Reactions: adsheff and Roy W.
I thought Tesla was google map based therefore always up to date?

I *think* there are 4 map updates a year. its a big download, so probably helps if the car has WiFi periodically. That doesn't guarantee good routing of course ... by comparison I've used Waze a couple of days after a bypass opened and it already knew about it.

Dunno how often your Audi maps were updated, but I owned 3 VWs before Tesla and in that time my maps updates were "never" :(
 
  • Like
Reactions: drewpost
I *think* there are 4 map updates a year. its a big download, so probably helps if the car has WiFi periodically. That doesn't guarantee good routing of course ... by comparison I've used Waze a couple of days after a bypass opened and it already knew about it.

Dunno how often your Audi maps were updated, but I owned 3 VWs before Tesla and in that time my maps updates were "never" :(

Re Audi, never is correct. Unless I pay them £150 or so for the privilege. Not happening. I currently tend to use google maps on Apple CarPlay as it’s better, but won’t be able to do that in the Model 3 either. I’ve used Waze too, it’s very good.

I’ll stick to the Tesla nav in my Model 3 and hope it’s good enough. 4 updates a year is pretty good and of course it has the added supercharger network guidance which is important.
 
Since Waze has come up, keep in mind Google owns them, as well.

Google reveals it spent $966 million in Waze acquisition - from 2013
They're kept separate internally though - maps and navigation engines are entirely separate. All google gets from waze is an import of user reports of closures etc, and all waze gets from google (which it also used before the acquisition) is a geolocation of user entered addresses/destinations and POIs if the POI doesn't exist in waze natively.
 
  • Like
Reactions: WannabeOwner
I’ve had the “take the wrong exit at the roundabout” instruction a couple of times so far in 1500 miles. The funny thing is that the map route on the screen is correct, it’s just the voice commands that are wrong, so there must be a disagreement between the various parts of the system.

Apart from those two islands, everything else has been fine. Generally I still feel it’s better than the nav on the Leaf or Kona, but I may be being swayed by the lovely big screen :)
 
Yeah, I'm not entirely sure where Tesla's multi-gigabyte quarterly "Navigation" download ends (that's only delivered over wifi too, make sure you have a period of good wifi connectivity at least a few times a month, even if it's tethered to your phone), and google live maps start.

Given that maps don't display when the car loses connectivity, I'm guessing the display part and live traffic-jam/closure info comes direct/live from google, but everything else is in the tesla download.

stacks up if the roundabout exit numbering spoken instructions are wrong but the image is correct.
 
Re google maps up-to-date-ness generally. Ever since the spate of issues they had with google map editors drawing rude words/images with sections of motorway, or accidently deleting some of London's bridges, they have reduced the number of editors able to make changes to the maps, by increasing the experience-bar/kudos points needed.

This leads to more stable maps, but because they didn't have a community feel to it (each editor was on his own) it's meant they are slower to update their maps in some cases. Google reps have since been seen visiting Waze map editors community conferences/get-togethers to see how waze does the community-bit.

Case in point, the new AWPR dual-carriageway around Aberdeen (largest road project in europe at the time). Google took a few months to get that into google maps. Other mapping services [coughwazecough] had it live on the opening morning [coughbecauseIaddedittowazecough] :)
 
Yeah. I'm not up to speed with how google do it, but in the waze map editor tools it periodically highlights missing-roads with map error pins, and also shows recent gps trails for all waze users. But for both of those, and probably the same for google map editors, a map editor has to be scanning the area in particular to notice, Or they're local and they know the map needs updating after an onsite visit/drive-by. or in the case of the AWPR the waze editor was following the project progress website and drawing in draft roads before they came in service

e.g. here's the waze map editors screen for the A1/M25/South Mimms junction

The rainbow coloured small arrows are GPS trails from waze users which we use to tweek/add waze roads. It also highlights one of the differences between waze and google maps. The sole purpose of waze maps are for simple/accurate navigation instructions. The first priority of Google maps is an accurate representation of a birds-eye-view of the map for people embedding it in websites which leads to a more complex/cluttered map. Routing/navigation comes second.

waze-south-mimms.png
 
Last edited: