Agreed - I've had similar issues when renting a big van - I was directed through streets where I didn't comply with width restrictions

There are GPS tools specifically for trucks, which are aware of width and height restrictions... try one of those next time.

Did you ever tell Google maps that you were in a big fan? Otherwise, how would it know?

Google Maps doesn't have anywhere to tell it you're driving a large vehicle.

Knowing about and respecting size and weight restrictions is usually a feature on 'professional' sat nav units [1]. Serious delivery companies of course pay the premium to get this feature - but occasional van drivers don't.

[1] https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/sat-nav/truck-sat-nav/

They probably infer your vehicle type from acceleration data

You could do that, theoretically, from several days of driving, with false positives and false negatives galore. Or you could ask the user...I know, not data driven, boooriiiing, and requires one more interaction.

How would that be possible? My sister has a new VW Polo with a 1.0L 65bhp engine, the official time to 60 is a glacial 16.5 seconds. I'm sure its acceleration profile would match that of a fully loaded HGV.

The time to turn, the time to break, way of turning lanes, all of it could be used to infer a vehicle type. I am not saying they do it, but it's likely.

If this information were used to infer vehicle size, Google would assume everyone in Seattle is driving an 18 wheeler.

It's quite error prone. I doubt they do it. Also deriving acceleration data requires sub second speed sampling. This needs to be done on device as it sends too much data sampling over the wire otherwise.

Can't imagine that being of any use in London, nothing moves.

Or more easily from the default Bluetooth name