Driving to work today through the outer bands of the hurricane when something occurred to me

Salty

Salty

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We often complain that we can't get simple tech that we take for granted in cars in our aircraft, but as I'm driving through bands of rain it occurred to me that my fancy 16" screen gps turns the line yellow because there is crap weather ahead, but doesn't show a radar picture, or any other useful weather data. And I've not seen any that do. Granted, it's not as important in the car, but it's a nice feature that's lacking in most (all?) gps software for cars.
 
My Ford can display wx radar over the map display. That was useful on a long highway trip two weekends ago, it gave me a heads-up on when and where to stop for lunch. My Garmin car GPS has a subscription feature for adding wx radar but I’ve never used it.
 
hmmm. maybe I just haven't figured out how to turn it on. I've got a ford, but all it shows now is the yellow line, like I mentioned.
 
On my Ford, WX is part of the Sirius XM Traffic info subscription. When buying new, you should get a 5 year complimentary subscription. But it isn't shown on the navigation page, instead you have to dive into the Apps page to find it. I found it useful once on a cross country road trip. I knew I was crossing some bad stuff, and I could see where I was going to hit and and when I would clear.
 
Recently when diving through a line of severe thunderstorms I pulled up AvareX on my phone and displayed the open street map and radar layers to get a sense of what I was heading into.
 
Can get a couple radar options on Apple CarPlay.
 
I've been hoping for that for years! My Audi has a prescription service that has long since lapsed. It has a weather radar page but it was pure crap. I forget the 3rd party app it was pulling up, but it was/is regional views only, horribly low resolution, couldn't be zoomed or panned, did not overlay the actual navigation map, etc... nearly useless

To my knowledge android auto (or google maps in general) doesn't offer anything like this. I reckon it will someday.
side comment: I sure do wish that car makers would just stop all this nonsense about having their own navigation apps, subscriptions, etc... and just focus on better integration with phones and Carplay/ Android Auto!
 

Driving to work today through the outer bands of the hurricane when something occurred to me​

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That you could be living here in the high desert where we got almost 1/100 of an inch of rain yesterday.??
 
The yellow line usually means traffic, which of course could be caused by weather or a hundred other things. Unless it was something really severe, I'm trying to understand the usefulness of weather radar in a car. It's not like you can divert around a buildup.

ETA, I guess it could give you more notice to pull over and put the convertible top up.
 
Lindberg said:
It's not like you can divert around a buildup.
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Sure you can. Or you might decide that this would be a good time for a lunch stop. Or you might pick a different beach or lake. Or.......
 
Half Fast said:
Sure you can. Or you might decide that this would be a good time for a lunch stop. Or you might pick a different beach or lake. Or.......
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I make such decisions based on much longer term forecasts than what's on the radar directly in front of me.
 
Lindberg said:
The yellow line usually means traffic, which of course could be caused by weather or a hundred other things. Unless it was something really severe, I'm trying to understand the usefulness of weather radar in a car. It's not like you can divert around a buildup.

ETA, I guess it could give you more notice to pull over and put the convertible top up.
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I think you’re right about the yellow line indicating traffic slowdown as an indirect indicator of wx.

My SYNC 4 Ford with the built in nav has a display setting you get to from the nav screen. It allows you to pop up the weather radar. It won’t allow it during active nav, though, it just switches to wx radar screen.

Last weekend, coming home from a road trip, I was trying to plan a lunch stop. We were in the clear but driving towards lightning on the horizon. I checked the radar and it looked like the red was going to hit my first choice right about the time I’d get there. I decided to just drive through it, pop out on the back side, and then stop for lunch. It worked. That might be the only time I’ve ever used it except for, “Hey! What’s THIS button do?”
 
Heck no!

I was driving my dad's car when a speech synthesizer piped up and helpfully informed me that there was a thunderstorm... some 50 miles from my location. Immediately pulled over, drilled into the unhelpful distractions menu and selected the STFU option under unsolicited advice.
 
Navver and Weather on the Way put weather radar, current conditions, and other stuff on a programmed route in Carplay
 
Half Fast said:
Okay, so it wouldn’t be useful to you.
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Correct. Or most people under the most common driving scenarios. Which is likely why it's not a common feature. Which seemed to be the question at the heart of the OP.
 
Lindberg said:
Correct. Or most people under the most common driving scenarios. Which is likely why it's not a common feature. Which seemed to be the question at the heart of the OP.
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Disagree. Having situational awareness that there is a storm cell ahead of you would be useful to most anyone. Now, would most people know how to use the info, maybe not.
 
semantics? what could be useful... if only it was used (correctly)... but what use would it have if ignored?
 
Also, Waze offers a bad weather report on the map.
 
Salty said:
Disagree. Having situational awareness that there is a storm cell ahead of you would be useful to most anyone. Now, would most people know how to use the info, maybe not.
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But not in the safe way it is in an airplane.

Cars drive on roads, so generally your not going to drive around a storm. Even where you could, it's generally not worth it because the consequence of driving through a storm is generally that your car gets wet..... Unless we're taking hurricane or tornado type storm..... And the area of interest for a car is much smaller, not to mention cars travel at ground level--below most weather rather than in it--so the driver's eyes are usually sufficient to see any weather that's an immediate issue.

We'll probably have "full situational awareness" in cars right around the time they all start driving themselves.
 
Lindberg said:
But not in the safe way it is in an airplane.

Cars drive on roads, so generally your not going to drive around a storm. Even where you could, it's generally not worth it because the consequence of driving through a storm is generally that your car gets wet..... Unless we're taking hurricane or tornado type storm..... And the area of interest for a car is much smaller, not to mention cars travel at ground level--below most weather rather than in it--so the driver's eyes are usually sufficient to see any weather that's an immediate issue.

We'll probably have "full situational awareness" in cars right around the time they all start driving themselves.
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My post didn’t use the word safe. I said useful.
 
Lindberg said:
"Safe" should be "same."
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Lindberg said:
"Safe" should be "same."
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I wholeheartedly disagree in the context of this thread and your specific post. There’s already a lot of useful information provided by various car nav apps that do nothing to improve safety. For example, toll and HOV lane awareness does nothing to increase safety, but is useful to me as a motorcycle rider because I can generally use any HOV lane while on two wheels.

Conversely, on two wheels, a bad weather alert 5-10mi down the road can help me decide to pull over and further understand what’s happening and decide if I want to do something different.
 
TCABM said:
Conversely, on two wheels, a bad weather alert 5-10mi down the road can help me decide to pull over and further understand what’s happening and decide if I want to do something different.
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Agreed, and a similar consideration when towing a horse trailer with the truck.
 
TCABM said:
I wholeheartedly disagree in the context of this thread and your specific post. There’s already a lot of useful information provided by various car nav apps that do nothing to improve safety. For example, toll and HOV lane awareness does nothing to increase safety, but is useful to me as a motorcycle rider because I can generally use any HOV lane while on two wheels.

Conversely, on two wheels, a bad weather alert 5-10mi down the road can help me decide to pull over and further understand what’s happening and decide if I want to do something different.
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Sounds like it could be useful for motorcycles.

I understood the thread to be about why this is available in small aircraft but not cars, when the level of technical sophistication of each is generally the opposite. My answer is that weather radar is something that's much more uniquely useful in aircraft than cars, and it doesn't provide a large marginal advantage over the alternatives already available to most drivers (e.g., eyeballs) like it does for pilots.

YMMV.
 
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It could be really important if your windshield wipers aren't working...:rolleyes:
 
Salty said:
We often complain that we can't get simple tech that we take for granted in cars in our aircraft, but as I'm driving through bands of rain it occurred to me that my fancy 16" screen gps turns the line yellow because there is crap weather ahead, but doesn't show a radar picture, or any other useful weather data. And I've not seen any that do. Granted, it's not as important in the car, but it's a nice feature that's lacking in most (all?) gps software for cars.
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Back many years ago, I had a Garmin Street Pilot with XM that showed weather on the screen.
 
I used weather radar and cloud cover maps extensively in the car last year while frantically driving halfway across NY state trying to get to clear skies to view the eclipse.

We weren't successful, but had there been a bit less overcast, it would have made the difference.

I know, kind of an edge case…
 
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