We were in Florida for the cruise and rented a Ford with CarPlay. I like CarPlay because of the larger navigation map and the fact that I get to play my own music but I don’t like how it saves info from my phone to the car, specifically because this isn’t my car.
That aside, were were having trouble with traffic on the routes that Apple Maps was providing so we switched over to Waze. Waze helps you avoid traffic by redirecting you around trouble spots and it was doing a great job except I noticed it was complaining about my speed.
In the top right corner of the map you can see it telling me that I’m going 80 but the speed limit is 70. If you haven’t used Waze don’t worry, that’s what it’s saying. But look at the speedometer, I’m actually going 69 mph.
This is where it gets weird, we switched over to Apple Maps and the speed displayed in CarPlay matched the car. Then we tried Waze without CarPlay and it matched as well. It only said I was speeding when we plugged into CarPlay.
We did some searching, and found that Waze is blaming it on the Ford implementation of CarPlay and it’s specific to a certain version of CarPlay in Ford cars. That can happen I guess but given that Apple Maps didn’t have the issue I’m wondering if there is more to it than a buggy version of CarPlay.
My theory is that, when using CarPlay, Apple Maps is using your phone’s GPS and sensors to determine speed and direction while Waze was trying to pull the data from the car’s navigation data. So maybe it is a buggy CarPlay, and a smooth move by Waze to try to reduce your phone’s battery drain. A lazier programmer would have just used the phone’s data for everything because it works once, why change it right?
If you see this same thing happening to you don’t worry, it’s a known issue with the software. Waze will still get you to your destination and help you avoid all of that traffic that you don’t really need to sit in.