Nightmare Experience on CarPlay as Volkswagen, Toyota Drivers Report GPS Issues

In most of the cases, the navigation apps just lose GPS tracking, providing inaccurate location information and obviously breaking down the directions displayed on the screen.

Such problems were reported by a 2020 Volkswagen Jetta on reddit a few days ago, and several others chimed in to confirm similar issues hitting other car brands, including Toyota and Honda. All iPhone models appear to be affected, even when running the latest stable iOS update.

“I recently bought a 2020 Volkswagen Jetta SEL, and I have noticed an issue with the navigation apps in CarPlay. This happens with Google Maps, Apple Maps, as well as Waze. When I start the navigation, it would sometimes get confused and move the arrow out of the route and go crazy. It also sometimes shows that I'm around 500 yards from the intersection when I'm ACTUALLY on the intersection,” a VW Jetta owner said.

Some believe it all comes down to the GPS signal received by the phone, and one 2020 Toyota Yaris owner says that putting the iPhone on the dashboard increases the GPS signal and resolves these issues.

The Jetta owner says Volkswagen inspected the car but found no problem with the Apple CarPlay support, which could be an indication that the issue resides either in the smartphone or in the CarPlay code itself.

“I deal with it by stopping navigation until it fixes itself and then start navigation again. It really sucks, but GPS is accurate 95% of the time so I just deal,” a Honda owner explains.

At the time of writing, there’s no workaround that does the magic for everyone and Apple is yet to acknowledge the problem. A new iOS update with CarPlay improvements, however, is expected later this month, so it remains to be seen if fixes will be included or not.