As someone who used to help out with Waze maps, raw GPS tracks from phones can be WAAAY off from actual roads and other GPS tracks.
Your phone looks for the most likely road for you to be on and snaps you to that road. Your car does a similar thing but has much higher GPS resolution than your phone so it is more likely to be right.
It’s a play on the quote “Life is a series of choices and reactions” from “Before The Fall”
google maps does weird things but gaia just uses the raw GPS data from the phone and doesn't snap, however when you are plugged into carplay the phone seems to always consider the car/trucks data more accurate even when its clearly not.
this could very well my specific truck (dealer has refused to look and i don't have another to compare to) or a general tacoma thing but it both smooths the GPS data to make "nicer" looking lines and often introduces drift over time as likely some processing it does compounds an error
(i also realize i said the wrong phone, iphone 14 not 12 but even with the 12 it was notably better then the truck but the 14 pro has a much improved GPS and it shows)
> If your vehicle has wireless CarPlay, the iPhone's GPS chip is completely ignored.
> If your vehicle has wired CarPlay, the iPhone's GPS chip may be ignored, depending upon what the head unit tells the phone to do.
this happens when near roads or not. the truck is doing something weird and wrong with the GPS data and forcing the phone to use it
Cars can theoretically have better GPS antennae, and can do better dead reckoning using wheel position and wheel rotation speed. But do they? I haven’t seen any evidence that any car actually does better than a modern phone.
Especially inside a dense city, WiFi location can be much more precise than GPS.
Japan has local satellites to help with this (QZSS) and local cars may handle that better than global phones.
Like waaaaaay better and more accurate