Apple Maps claims it's 29,905 miles away
47 comments
·December 14, 2025monerozcash
stockresearcher
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
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.
worewood
A badly programmed Kalman filter perhaps
hnlmorg
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
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)
kijin
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 exactly orbits of GPS satellites from time to time. Satellites slowly lose altitude and need to be boosted back up periodically. 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 it 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minutes (bad firmware, faulty memory, tunnels, underground parking lots, etc), it will be relying on increasingly outdated info and drift far off its actual location.
bragr
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.
somenameforme
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.
roywiggins
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
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.
Liftyee
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).
bragr
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.
billyjmc
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.
technothrasher
I remember cars in the early 2000's doing this. Haven't seen that behavior in years.
kbutler
Looks like others have reported similar issues. Entering a navigation route may help?
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/map-location-and-rou...
zkmon
Actual distance about 3.2k miles plus equator length of 25k miles plus what else?
throwaway290
Altitude
hdgvhicv
Directions suggest an average speed over 500 mph. Not bad for driving.
speedgoose
48 137 km.
rzzzt
1.2 times the circumference of the Earth. Is space compressed between SF and Guatemala City somehow?
websiteapi
Oh wow, a bug
sva_
In Apple Maps? Unpossible!
MiscIdeaMaker99
Except this one is not on the windshield.
MiscIdeaMaker99
Looks like a bug that I hope someone will have a fun time fixing.
srean
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.
nashashmi
I think the developers didn’t account for lost AirTags many hundreds of miles away. And that long calculation was not the best.
rebolek
Fixing bugs. At Apple. OK.
amelius
Loved the comment about the fractal shaped path.
1317
context?
Etheryte
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.
reliabilityguy
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_
Seems like the author of the linked post has a lost airtag located in the abyss.
pushedx
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
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
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
But what if you count the distance of going in and out of each tiny crack on the road surface?
Y_Y
> 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
thfuran
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.
jb1991
I question your use of the word “easily”.
lugao
Maybe the OP should read about fractals before posting a pedantic message about fermi questions.
thfuran
Are you saying that you think Apple Maps is directing him to drive along a fractal instead of a road?
rvnx
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
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
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.
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.