Apple Maps vs. Google Maps
forbes.com
forbes.com
For me it seems like fair exchange to give some data, for free and very good service that have no real competition :)
Apple's cycling routing is miles ahead of Google's.
Apple does give me some funky directions through Victoria Park, though I'm always surprised when any map service can route through parks somewhat well.
I never wanted to use Google Maps, but had to due to the feature. Using "Apple Maps" was the default preferred position.
I think Apple Maps looks better and is easier to use than Google Maps. I especially dislike the Google Maps turn by turn directions interface.
I’ve used Google Maps’ offline saving feature when traveling internationally and where cell service is poor or absent.
I should mention that Apple Maps, being vector based, can be pre-downloaded using the hotel wifi when you are in a roaming area and will work for many blocks around the hotel without using the radios. Google won’t.
You download a region before being there, then you can use the app completely offline. The 'completely offline' modus only works for the downloaded data, obviously.
I'm using it quite a bit abroad, since roaming data outside of Switzerland is really expensive :)
Google Maps is good in a backwater town in some country you've never heard of.
CityMapper >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Apple Maps >>>>> Google Maps
Literally unusable.
[Edit: I just learned from another comment that Apple Maps _does_ have cycling directions at least in London, which I didn’t know about]
Part of the reason for that is they use Yelp as a data source which is pretty much non-existent here. If I look at a popular local restaurant on Apple Maps (one which has thousands of reviews on both Google and TripAdvisor) then the opening hours are just wrong and seemingly pulled from Yelp where the restaurant is unclaimed and has just 9 reviews, all in English rather than the native language.
While Maps also has some discrepancies between cities and also different countries, in general it's a lot more consistent and features roll out more widely.
Justin O'Beirne has followed Google/Apple maps in detail for years https://www.justinobeirne.com/
Forbes is an American business magazine and the author covers cover security and surveillance. So I wouldn't think his advice is meant for everyone.
> This will only be available in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, and London by the end of the year.
So 4 cities 6 months after announcements.
I would rather give my data to the qualitatively better option OSM than a controversial foreign firm that has questionable stance on user privacy.
For those who've not been to the UK before, in urban areas a postcode and a house number are enough to identify a property.
- Stovězov (no idea) = Prague. Update: Ahhh could be "city of a hundred spires"
- Bryncl = Brno (in local hantec dialect)
- Malá videň ("Little Vienna") = Šumperk
- Jo, budě vice! (sort of "Yeh, there'll be more!") - České Budějovice which you might know better as Budweis as in "Budweiser". I feel like there's more to this one I'm mising
- Piveň (mixture of "Pivo"=beer and "Plzeň") = Plzeň, you might know as Pilsen as in Pilsner
- Baťovo Hlavní Město ("Baťa's capital city") = Zlín, original home of the Baťa shoe company
- Koněpůlky (I think horse's ass-cheeks but I've no idea why?) - Pardubice
- Camping - Tábor, which is the Czech word for a camp
You can probably figure out what "voda", "les", "dalnice", "silnice", and "hranice" mean from where they appear all over the map :-)
Google Maps is a standalone end-to-end application with best-in-class POI search, POI metadata, reviews, routing based on live traffic, ETA based on live traffic, etc.
MapOut is very good, paid but worth it. I tried many others before.
There also comes the issue that OSM in general is not optimized for navigation. Interstate ramps and exits, for instance, are named improperly or not named at all.
Despite it stating that the destination was indeed that school, I ended up in a residential street over 3 miles away.
The carplay interface of it also wasn't as easy to follow as on Google Maps - which is surprising.
Google Maps took us right to the door.
It was on a tahoe trip to ski, we happened to hit a snowstorm that day. Apple Maps decided to optimize the route and suggested a better route through a friggin road that passed rather close to a ski station (could even look the name up).
We had a 4x4 and we were fine for the most part, but things got really bad when descending, started loosing traction and in one turn we actually slided and the snow stopped us on the edge of a cliff, not even exagerating.
To be 100% clear, this is entirely our fault. We should have been with chains from the very beginning. But it's still shocking to me Apple Maps would suggest such a freaking route in the middle of a snow storm. Would Gmaps have done the same? Probably?
Experience was bad enough to swear never open AMaps again.
But it’s not as reliable, in the sense that it sometimes recommends seasonal roads that are closed in the winter and even in the summer need AWD.
I haven’t had any problem with Apple Maps, and I appreciate the integration with the Apple Watch. So, I’m using it more. Plus, the Yelp app connects to Apple Maps automatically.
And I’m drifting away from Google, anyway.
I think you’re significantly overestimating Apple’s AI efforts if you think that’s shocking.
Google, maybe they’re smart enough to pull that off today, but I’d be surprised.
However, I’m notoriously bad at predicting future tech, so what do I know.
Apple has been creating their own map data and switching over to it for a while now.
North America is complete and Europe is just starting with the UK finished and online and the Iberian Peninsula just coming online a month ago.
With Google maps, I just fire it up and search “sights” to find places near that are worth a visit. “Public beaches” to find where I can go for a swim. If I try the same with Apple Maps, more often than not I get sent to a place in Myanmar or similar which happens to be tagged as “public beach”.
Also when I search for a business on Google maps, I get photos and reviews. With Apple Maps I am happy if I get a link to a website.
The Yelp integration is what annoys me. I don’t care much about the stars or anything in Google Maps but the photos and sometimes comments be can very instructive. On Apple Maps this information is hidden behind a third party service I don’t use or want to use.
I have found the Timeline feature in Google maps to be a huge game changer in terms of 'where ive been' and 'what Ive done'. I can look back months, see exactly what routes I went down, where I was at a given time. It will even match pictures with the locations.
Especially for journaling vacations (sometimes weeks later), and reliving memories, its the greatest app Ive used in some time.
So can Google.
I'd love to have these features but the price is just too high. The price would be too high even if I trusted Google (which I don't), because every company that collects personal information will be hacked because no company is properly incentivised to protect users' data.
The only way to opt out is to turn your phone off (equivalently, leave it at home).
For some people, the fact that google also knows it is no big deal. For some it is. But if you are worried about your whereabouts being leaked, how can you justify using a phone in the first place? Verizon and AT&T are more likely to get hacked than google (or just sell that info outright, which they have done wholesale before)
If someone chooses to be privacy focused, then they will likely opt out of the things that they can control - that doesn’t change because there are others they can’t.
At this point, location tracking by companies is about as “voluntary” as using the web itself.
Or about as voluntary as actions which are performed with a pistol to one’s head.
Not really. Tower triangulation is nowhere close to as accurate. It places you in the general agea with a pretty large error bound. Leaking Behavioural details require fine grained location.
Privacy fatalism helps no one. Demanding that someone who is concerned about their privacy to “justify” their situation — one which they have no practical way of opting out of - is victim blaming.
Some people don’t want to be tracked. Any steps they take to reach that state are valid. Absolute privacy is impossible in this dystopia we now inhabit —- much of which has been built by the people who frequent this board —- but these doesn’t make Google’s absolutely trash privacy practices any less egregious.
Just because one industry has access to my location data without me being able to stop it, doesn't mean I'm going to give any other company that wants it unfettered access to my location data for whatever purpose they want.
With maps the good news is I do have an opportunity to pick providers that have better privacy policies.
Certainly, some people will want to minimize the number of parties that know you were in location X at time Y. But I’d guess that for many people, myself included, that data simply isn’t that sensitive or interesting.
[1] All the major U.S. carriers (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile) have been fined for reselling users’ location data without consent: https://www.govtech.com/network/wireless-carriers-face-200m-...
More interestingly so can anyone who can get a subpoena or some equivalent judicial order issued to have Google release your location to them.
I know you're speaking in broader terms, but for anyone interested you can have this specific feature (location history) using owntracks and owntracks recorder completely privately.
The issue with privacy labels also is that you have to list the worst possible scenario, whereas through options, you can possibly reduce that list quite a bit.
Google Maps now has an incognito mode which unless I'm wrong would be equivalent if not more privacy centric than Apple Maps. But again, the privacy labels can't show that, they only show labels for the worse case.
More than once, Google search suggestions have been freakishly good; this is coming out of my ass, but I feel like they might use your contacts for suggestions, which I usually notice studying last minute for a test or whatnot.
Then, of course, you have things like Google Photos, the aforementioned Google Maps features, etc.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/arc-app-location-activity/id10...
I’ll bat for google on this one, the value I get from Gmaps vs the value they get from my data seems like a fair exchange.
Also PSA, if you use Bluetooth with your car, your city transport department is tracking you. Best of luck opting out of that or even finding who to contact.
A GPS or Bluetooth signal would be far more precise as a mass surveillance tool, so let’s not give that up
Can you say more about this? I've never heard of it.
They put powerful bluetooth sensors on poles or in roadside cabinets. They're pretty cheap to deploy so have become widely used.
Pretty much if you have two bluetooth devices talking to each other, you can be tracked by your bluetooth mac address. (Same as wifi networks and sniffing with wireshark etc)
Or if you have a device pinging with a non-random mac (ie your car).
If you've got an iphone and it's not actively being used, you get a random mac, no problems.
Bluetooth sensors are more widely used, you've just never noticed them.
Also, the highway congestion is most likely done with magnetic inductance loops.
BUT when I started seeing so many obvious advertising things going on in google maps the writing was on the wall. Lately the advert items started looking an awful lot like my starred places, that's some dark patterns I'm not going to put up with.
I haven’t given it a fair shot in almost a decade I guess, and it was almost unusable then. Does anyone here use it as a daily driver? What are the strong and weak points?
I am not going to enumerate strong and weak points. It’s a matter of taste at this point. Just try it again.
I recently had GM tell me to go the wrong way up a one-way street; OSM knew better.
This is in Northern England though. In the Big Smoke it might be different.
I only kept Google Maps installed for info on things along a route or opening hours but since then I’ve deleted it and just use Duck Duck Go to do searches, combined with Apple Maps for GPS.
Edit: one more thing: in the city I am from there has been a lot of development. Google is missing a ton of roads in near areas where Apple Maps is not.
If Apple Maps had knew those backroards, they would probably output the same routes! :-D
Being able to express your preference isn't what Google is all about. Their attitude is that they know best.
Those rental Pandas can take you everywhere though.
I will never forget being led from a highway, to a side road, to a gravel road, to a rougher gravel road, to a one lane gravel road, to something that looked like a washed out river at best, only to be blocked by a large steer standing in the middle of the "road" that appeared to be as stunned by my presence there as I was. I ended up having to reverse quite a bit before I could find somewhere to turn around. I deleted Google Maps shortly thereafter.
I would pay money for this feature.
However I generally don’t use any turn by turn instructions until I’m close to a place I haven’t been before.
Haven’t used Google maps since my very first smartphone (probably late 2011) kept trying to send me the wrong way down one way streets in Atlanta.
Google Maps even with VPN (to bypass the censorship) is nearly unusable here by modern map software standards.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-ce...
Google Maps will still give you very basic maps in China, but at least in both Beijing and Shanghai the maps are unusable unfortunately.
You're correct that they are blocked by China. The reason they are blocked is because they haven't built a censored version of their search and don't provide China with data from emails, etc. - this is in contrast with Apple's approach. I don't know where it falls on censorship, since Apple isn't in the search business, but my guess is you would notice differences in Siri's behavior (for instance).
But yes I agree with you from my own visit in Shanghai that Google Maps is not worth using in China.
Actual arrival times tended to be about the same as Apple’s original estimates when, say, it turned out that I-95 really did have traffic at the same places it always does.
The OP's comment about Google's directions often giving you things like unprotected left turns across major roads matches my experience with Waze, so I wonder if Google is pulling in more data/algorithms from them now. I know lots of people love (loved?) Waze and I used to be one of them, but I eventually just couldn't handle how almost every ride with Waze had become the algorithmic equivalent of your crazy uncle saying "I know a shortcut. Trust me."
I’d hope they’ve improved it since then. I mostly stopped using it because I’d get tons of unprotected left turns on major roads or zig-zag routes through neighborhoods and it just wasn’t worth having to deal with that to save a minute.
The other day when watching a Silicon Valley rerun I couldn't help but laugh because they said "is it Apple maps bad?" and i thought "THAT JOKE HASN'T AGED BECAUSE IT'S STILL TERRIBLE."
Then again - even Google Maps have hard time competing with Yandex and 2Gis
I find it to be better, but there’s a major caveat that I primarily use it in the Bay Area.
Outside the bay it’s worked for me too, but it’s just rare that I test it in that way (where failures are a lot more likely).
UI is much nicer and app performance feels way faster too.
I really really like OSM through Organic Maps (previously through maps.me) but it has no congestion data, so mostly useless for driving during business hours.
Both have been equally bad at keeping directions up to date, though, but I live in a relatively mutable city. If I were living in the burbs, I would probably stick with Apple Maps.
Motorways show up in blue with white-on-blue-rounded-rectangle labels (matching road signs) with A-roads in green. Junction numbers show up as white-in-black-rounded-rectangle like on road signs. On google maps, the motorways and A-roads are yellow. Motorways get blue labels but it’s the wrong shade and shape. A-road labels are slightly better. A failure of apple maps is that they don’t show junction numbers on the regular maps while google does. But their maps mostly look like the road atlases I remember.
If I look at public transport, apple have made a much better attempt to match the look of underground maps in London (failure example: the map doesn’t make it obvious that the jubilee line stops at green park.) Google maps don’t get such good results though they try to match colours of lines. Google maps don’t have national rail but apple do. If I look at New York, apple have tried to capture the different style of their metro network (also their American road labels look like the road signs and this seems less the case for google but I don’t know so much about US road signs.)
The feature I really wish for, especially in car play, is plan views of road junctions like roundabouts or weird intersections. Neither maps app does this.
With a few notable exceptions it has gotten me where I'm going every time.
The few exceptions are places near me where the address is a bit wonky on Apple Maps and the driving instructions are either completely bonkers (routes around a house through a parking lot instead of directly) or off by one street. The address is correct, but the access road doesn't have a name, so it gets confused.
"Go past this stop sign, then at the light, turn right on X Avenue" - it's exactly how you would expect human directions.
Google Maps is absolutely worst in class, behind all competitors I have ever used, in spoken directions. Here is a very common Google Maps direction from where I live: "In 300 feet, keep left toward Alabama 231 South / Alabama 431 South / Memorial Parkway Southwest, then keep left onto Memorial Parkway Southwest."
By the time Google Maps finishes reading this direction, it's taken so long that you will actually miss the next step in the directions. Google Maps doesn't interrupt itself in this situation, and it is often extremely long winded.
Even when you start directions on Google Maps, you get a mostly pointless, long-winded direction. "Head east on Pratt Avenue Northeast." And if you start by traveling perpendicular to that direction, you'll often get, "Head east on -- Head east on -- Head east on -- Head east on --", repeating every time you pass an intersection, until you finally comply by heading east. Good luck if you don't know which direction is east.
Speaking of this nightmare scenario, Google Maps will also get stuck rapidly talking over itself if you accidentally select walking directions, but you are driving. Apple Maps detects this situation and automatically fixes it.
So I guess I use Apple Maps because it doesn't have any of these extremely frustrating and borderline dangerous problems.
Argh, don't you just love that. Hey, dumbasses: if I knew which way was east, I wouldn't have needed to ask you!
Google Maps has given me directions that just increase my stress level on the road.
I live around Austin, TX, so there could be variations in my experience, but generally for common use cases, Apple Maps is on par. Where I find it excels above Google Maps is on navigation and directions, hands down. When my wife puts on Gmaps navigation on her phone I put on Apple Maps on mine. (we have same phone and network). If there ever is a mistake, slow update, mispronunciation, etc. it is always on Google Maps side. This has cost us a lot of time, until we finally switched over to rely on Apple Maps for navigation. The search and interface are also about the same, but I prefer the Apple Maps a bit more, but that is more personal preference.
Where it underperforms is in the search and reviews avenue, as it primarily relies on yelp reviews rather than native reviews, which can be hit or miss. I don't really miss it, but if it do, I just search google for the place to read their reviews. Also, Some place results lack correct details in Apple Maps (rare)--I think since many places have to update the info themselves, this might drive the issue. Example would be updated menu links or hours for holidays.
Many of the other posts on this thread point out the differences along other use cases, where Google Maps excels, but for daily, average use, I am happy to use Apple Maps as daily driver.
I tried desperately to use it for half a year (in the US), gritting my teeth at the endless frustrations. From the inability to get info on any business or location other than a highly biased Yelp popup, to the voice directions telling me to turn as I'm approaching the turn before it actually wants me to turn, to the flat-out wrong streets. I've found myself being led to random dead-ends that the map said should be a thoroughfare, but obviously never had been and would unlikely be in any near future.
Similarly, I'm astonished at the bad service in their cloud, files, photos, music, and suite of office document programs. Just terrible for such a huge company. I can only conclude that they don't care, since they're making more than enough money on hardware.
At least in Northern California and where I worked in both Texas and Oklahoma, Apple has done a magical job of mapping.
With Google Maps, we were often surprised by the directions: it would be like keep left... keep left...TURN AROUND NOW.
Apple Maps often shows the next two directions, and more clearly dictates what we should do next.
... with iOS15, Apple maps are just gorgeous, and I've completely deleted Google maps (I now have no dependence on Google services for personal life).
Google has sat on its hands the last couple years with Google Maps: it has hardly improved at all, and outside of their move to jack up prices for API users, I haven't heard of any real changes.
It's a pretty mature product, so you'd expect the pace of signjificant change to be much slower. And large, noticeable change (like a redesign) is a poor metric, as it often feels like a PM getting their wings at the expense of user experience, including muscle memory in an app as useful as Maps.
Despite these caveats, I can think of a new feature off the top of my head: a heatmap of all photos I've ever taken appearing on Google maps. I just moved to New York and it's been both useful and delightful to rediscover where I've been from a new perspective, driven by the serendipitous photos I took over the last decade of sporadic visits.
Yet another new feature I just remembered is Live View compass calibration. Anybody who lives in a big city can relate to how irritating compass quality is around large buildings. The ability to calibrate my compass in two seconds via camera recognition of the street scene is a huge quality of life improvement.
Im usually hesitant to disagree with other people's opinions, but it really sounds like you either have no familiarity with Google Maps or are stuck in a 2010 Apple vs Google fanboy-war view of the world. The reason Maps is so wildly popular is because it consistently pushes out user experience both improvements that are straightforwardly (if incrementally) useful and occasional larger "cool" (and also useful) features. To get as wildly wrong an interpretation as yours (of Maps as somehow stagnant) reeks of willful ignorance.
Disclosure: I work for Google, not on Maps or Photos.
Personally, I like to use the map to occasionally update my mental map, not for turn by turn spoon-feeding. Apple’s app makes this much more convenient.
Additionally, bookmarking in Google Maps remains primitive and hard to manage. Apple introduced collections over the last few years which are great.
What I miss the most about Google Maps is the photos, which are generally better than Yelp (and don’t open a new app).
Apple has work to do outside of US, but their maps make steady progress year after year, and if the US indicate where rest of the world is headed, things will get better.
Apple offers nothing like this. I can even download a Takeout dump from Google import it other apps for processing.
Apple Maps POI database still seems pretty bad IMHO, but worse is that it’s search function is broken. If I am searching for something, return results sorted by distance. Sometimes Apple Maps returns businesses with the same name in other states or countries before one right next to me. Maybe their POI database isn’t the problem, and it’s search. Given the years they’ve had to improve their broken App Store search, it doesn’t raise my confidence that it’ll improve soon.
However, it commonly gives me just the wrong destination. Just the other day, it put me five blocks away from the actual address in Downtown LA. Which is... well, suboptimal.
> you're saying, in so many words, only people who are fanboys use Apple maps because Apple fans are sheep so why should Apple bother.
This is a reasonable interpretation if you read my comment carelessly, because I was pretty imprecise with my phrasing.
First off, I don't think my sample is close to representative of all users, but I've come across it often enough in diverse enough contexts that I'm comfortable considering brand-loyalty-as-motivation to be a non-trivial part of the market dynamic here.
I'm also not artificially deducing brand loyalty from assumptions about the quality of the product, and I recognize that its most famous failings don't encapsulate overall product quality (in fact, I didn't make any direct claims about product quality). The "brand-loyal" people I'm referring to are the ones who've explicitly said to me that they use Apple Maps so that it can "get more user data and get better". This kind of altruism is vanishingly rare in most product relationships, and brand loyalty is by far the most parsimonious explanation. This shouldn't be surprising; theres a reason that Apple's marketing and product competencies are world-renowned, and I have plenty of other from-the-horse's-mouth examples (like the family members who sincerely ask me why I'd choose an Android, as they had _literally_ never heard a reason other than "can't afford an iPhone").
Apple's relatively poor competency at services (vs hardware products) is a subjective claim, but one that isn't an unreasonable conclusion for a thoughtful person to land on (or disagree with).
To put it all together, something like this more accurately conveys my point:
I have enough data points of strong brand loyalty shaping Apple consumer behavior, particularly in the case of Maps, that I fairly consider it a non-trivial factor in usage of the product. I don't discount (and in fact directly call out) the possibility of the app fitting a specific consumer better, nor do I claim that it's not a better product overall, as I'm not familiar enough with it to make that claim. A situation with stickier brand loyalty _requires_ less competition on usability than the counterfactual (this is practically tautological).
If you can't see the difference between the above and the trivially-disprovable factual claims in the comment I described, then your definition of "fanboy" seems to be little more than "dislike a product I like".
When using navigation, I will often use Apple Maps. Their biggest advantage is that their directions will say “after the next stop sign, turn right at the following traffic light.” Thats so much more useful than most other Map apps. So in the city, I prefer Apple Maps. If I need the shortest route including traffic or if I need to drive fast and watch out for cops, I will use Waze.
For example, I personally would be outraged if they removed Timeline, which I rely on daily, but that feature alone probably adds a dozen privacy labels, even though it's optional.
Same thing applies to Messages vs. WhatsApp/Messenger and bunch of others.
Also is there a feature where I can save "school for kids", "work", "sports"? I could not locate it.
while this might not be for everyone. It is time consuming for me but i find this a good exercise for myself. i use streetcomplete (android app) often to update the streets and that is a good feature of openstreetmaps
I want to slowly build a robust network.
As to Apple maps I gave up when the dumped us in a field in Norfolk (England). It was about 5 miles from the proper destination, and no clue how to get to a road going there.
Apple has generally copied Google's mobile UI approach, which has been devolving for a few years now (2018 brought the large and useless bottom "explore" panel IIRC). Google's iOS app is almost impossible to use as an actual map now -- it's exceedingly difficult to pan, orient, or zoom to inspect things. Everything you do has to be part of some flow that somebody designed, while it flashes surveys at you. Trying to do anything else just bounces you between flows in a loop. It's become and idiot app to the point that I wonder how those involved sleep at night.
I've never tried multi-point itineraries with Google Maps, but the new iOS beta has an "add stop" feature. It's not exactly what I was hoping for because it only has predefined searches ("food", "gas", etc). What it does is pause your original trip with a button to continue. If it could do a generic search along the route it would be exactly what I need most of the time without being too confusing to use.
Apple Maps isn’t perfect but I can just about rely on audio for navigating (and the occasional glance for everything else)
I do like the contextual directions on Apple Maps they say “at the next signal turn left” but I refuse to use two map apps
I would avoid Apple Maps entirely if they allowed Google Maps full access to the Watch OS.
Inexplicably once or twice a year Apple Maps decides that different sections of SH1 is closed and sends you on a wild detour.
Right now, Apple Maps thinks that a short 30m (100ft) stretch of SH1 is closed just north of Warkworth. (It’s not closed, I drive it daily, and have reported to Apple weeks ago.)
The suggested detour is a miserable, slow, and windy drive. Why Apple, why?!
I use Google maps which gets its job done and has offline support. I just wish they cleaned up the UI a bit and allowed me to download more area because right now I’ve to do it 3-4 times to get a size able chunk of a state.
Also Waze time estimates are stupidly accurately. You think you can beat their estimate by driving faster but it somehow accounts for that, eg if average speed on 101 is currently 80 mph the estimates will reflect that. Waze puts Apple Maps to shame for navigation.
The way it reports adding a stop (say for gas station) as how many minutes off route is extremely useful.
The position of the cameras is correctly marked on the map, so you just need to keep an eye on the map rather than trust the audible alerts.
Sometimes, going on some weird detour with Waze is appealing. Apples routes are usually a few minutes longer.
I've switched to Apple Maps on long drives because it uses significantly less battery and phone stays cooler. Has anyone else experienced this?
But, I use Apple Maps almost always because of two things: privacy, and because of my Apple Watch.
If I need Google Maps then I run it from Safari on my iPhone.
I have never missed Google maps.
But it reeeeeally wants to be!
Is this broadly true or specific to vehicle?