ex-quattro PETE

Driving this morning, I see this white/gray blank patch on the map. I've driven this road many times before, but today is the first time when this rectangular blank patch appeared. Did some data not get loaded fully this time around? Does this happen often to you guys?

idale

Never seen that personally, though I've got a data plan and use the Google Earth overlay so it's not necessarily running through all the same code. With the little bit of red visible in the wrong place and the slight angle of light green, I think what happened is that rectangle got misplaced when the nav was laying out the map tiles. No idea why it'd do that, unless it's something silly like it didn't update the location of the tile and so it was sliding underneath the others (that updated as you moved).

ex-quattro PETE

Thanks. How do you enable Google Earth overlay? We do have a data plan.

dadizon

Go to the "Google Earth - Learn how to activate Google Earth" tutorial here:

Audi connect® Help & Support | Audi USA

ex-quattro PETE

Thanks!

ex-quattro PETE

So this missing tile issue still happens to me, although not very frequently. Is this possibly something that an updated firmware might cure?

Redd

Perhaps a memory glitch, i.e. that data was stored in a bad spot in the hardware memory? Or perhaps that area was recently de-mapped by Google? They will blank out certain areas upon request, usually military bases and other "sensitive" sites. These days, even basic maps of the internet backbone lines have been removed from the internet. Public water supplies...all sorts of things are following the example of Soviet-era cartography.

ex-quattro PETE

I'm not using Google maps. This is just the built-in maps stored locally. I drive this route every day. 99% of the time it displays this area fine. But on a rare occasion there will be a tile missing, like in the above photo.

Redd

Sorry, Pete, the Google overlay bit distracted me.

"East Fulton Street East" doesn't seem to have any military value (fooled me!) so I'd bet on a mapping error or a memory glitch.

One of the big and consistent errors in all this consumer-market mapping is the actual geolocation end of things. Somewhere in the software there are instructions that say "Load x. For x, draw X at Y,Z. Load next x." and all it would take is one garbled line of code, either in an "update" of the maps, or caused by a corruption in one physical system (one CD, memory card, your MMI's nav buffer, etc.) to make that happen.

Hardware or software, it doesn't really matter, I think all you can do is take it in and say the magic words: "Takee Fixee".

Unless, of course, perhaps there was a big blue paint spill on Fulton?(G)

ex-quattro PETE

Yep. I'll mention it to the SA and show him the photo next time the car is in for service, and hopefully I'll get a free map and/or firmware upgrade out of this, even if it does not fix this particular glitch.