(I use Android Auto, but it's basically the same thing for these purposes)
I depend on it for road trips, navigating to unfamiliar destinations, or even just sharing ETAs with people
Or maybe everyone's misunderstanding your question?
First thing he did was slap a massive TomTom sat nav in the middle of the screen. He got pretty indignant when I told him to take it off, because it was blocking my view out the windscreen.
"But how will you know where to go?"
Dude, it's London. London is south. We go south. We go south for like eight hours.
We can use the sat nav for the last dozen or so of the 400-odd miles we'll be driving.
All you have now is two routes with a roughly equal amount of traffic on.
One of those routes will be a massive detour.
I have no idea why it's contentious that having nationwide surveillance of traffic patterns would result in better routing decisions.
I just kind of don't get why people are so into it.
I don't think I could stand to have any sort of lit-up screen doing something in my eyeline when I'm driving. I turn off the backlight on the dashboard when I'm driving at night because it annoys me.
Why would I care about speed traps or road obstacles? "Poor traffic conditions" isn't really something I can do much about, either.
Also, those notifications can likely be conveyed using audio-only warnings, anyway. Making all of this discussion a bit moot.
Finally the entire benefit of live navigation is to find alternate routes with less traffic! That is something you could literally do about.
I don't want audio alerts for anything either. It's really simple - I don't want anything in the car that beeps, flashes, lights up, makes noise, or indeed does anything that is not directly part of making the car go in the required direction at the required speed.
"I don't understand why other people would do X"
"Well, it can be because of Y, Z, or W."
"But I don't do/need/want any of those"
"..."
It's like it's a fundamental failure to understand that other minds are separate from yours and have different motives and preferences.
Traffic changes while I'm driving and it automatically updates. An accident can occur on a bridge I'm approaching and I can get detoured and save actual time that I can spend with loved ones instead.
If I'm driving later at night, construction may block off my normal route and I can still get wherever I'm going.
I also get notifications for hazards like objects on the road, disabled vehicles, or events that are going to cause traffic. (I use Waze)
And the cost is zero. When I get into my car it automatically syncs and off I go. There's no reason to NOT have it.
Taxi/ambulance drivers who are required to memorise large parts of their city have the lowest dementia risk out of all (studied) professions.
I don’t use active navigation, if I don’t know hot go get where I am going I just memorize the portion of the route I don’t know and then drive there. I will occasionally see what route is recommended due to road construction, but I generally know all of the proposed routes so I don’t need GPS once I pick one.
I avoid using active GPS navigation so my mental map of the road network stays in my brain, I think orientation/navigation is an important skill to maintain and using active turn-by-turn GPS destroys it.
This reeks of the metrics-gaming desperation that we've seen in Google, Amazon, and Microsoft as well.
Shoehorn unpopular technology to gatekeep popular technology. Either way the consumer's quality of life goes down.
I use it on the phone to set alarms, add tasks or calendar events, I swipe up on the home screen to launch the app, and talk. For calendar, speech ("add calendar event dentist appointment on September 22 at 4pm") is even much more convenient than scrolling to the right month/date, using the UI to pick the time.
I'm currently vibe-coding a replacement app to use on-device speech recognition and setting alarms or adding calendar events. Sadly third party apps can't add stuff to Google Tasks without further interaction (or without OAuth) like Assistant/Gemini can.
The discrepancy of using both with an iphone is disconcerting.