My wife and I are on a two-week driving vacation. From our home in Manhattan Kansas we are driving to Worcester MA, with stops along the way in West Lafayette IN, State College and Scranton PA.
Our new (to us) Honda CR-V has Apple Car play, something I have wanted to have in a car since it was announced. The first two days of driving were over ground I’ve covered many times before, so I had the map displayed but didn’t really use it or need it. Leaving Tipp City (north of Dayton OH) this morning I wanted directions to get around Columbus, So I put in Wheeling WV as a destination, just to get the map pointed in the right direction.
The first thing I noticed was that, when the map is in give-you-directions mode, it shows the current posted speed limit. When you just have the map displayed but aren’t using it for navigation you don’t see that. (I guess you could tap on the map to bring up the information overlays, even without a destination.)
The second thing was that Siri would announce upcoming speed traps, apparently crowd sourced from other drivers who used the built in report feature to pass on that information.
The third thing, and by far the most impressive to us, was getting an announcement that I-70 East was closed ahead of us, with an estimated delay of 45 minutes (This estimate was at least an hour before we arrived at the start of the alternate route, by then the delay had grown considerably). We took the suggested alternate route, which put us on a 4-lane state road parallel to the Interstate. Several other cars took the same route, and several semis did as well. Most of the traffic continued on past the alternate route exit. From that exit you couldn’t see any sign of a road closure. My guess is the other cars were also using CarPlay and decided to follow the suggested alternate route. Not all the semis took the alternate, so maybe some trucks have CarPlay and some don’t? Is CB still a thing in the age of cell phones?
Part way along the detour, we could see the Interstate, and the east bound lanes were a massive parking lot. Miles of cars and trucks standing on the highway. Having CarPlay saved us hours of time and frustration today. This evening I did a Google search and learned that a semi and crashed against a barrier, caught fire, and dumped its load on the highway. It took several hours to clean up and reopen the highway.
This one event makes CarPlay worth it. I don’t ever want to travel long distance by car again without it.