Android Automotive gains Google Maps incident reporting function

Damien Wilde | Oct 4 2024 - 1:32 am PT

Android Automotive is getting feature parity with Auto as live incident reporting in Google Maps is rolling out right now for the in-car OS.

While Android Auto is effectively a tethered phone-led experience that plugs into your car, Android Automotive is car first – which poses some problems for software updates and user experience. Back in July, Google confirmed that live incident reports were coming to Android Auto and Automotive, but it has taken a few extra days to come to the latter in Google Maps.

Incident reporting was first launched on Google Maps a few years ago. Annoyingly, this feature has been limited to mobile devices only. But in July of this year, Google added the feature to Apple’s CarPlay in-car system. Not long after, the feature was announced to be coming to India with a global rollout expected. As of last week, incident reporting began rolling out widely.

Since that rollout began for mobile devices, it appears that the switch has been flipped on Android Automotive hardware, too, as I’m now able to use the incident reporting function from within Google Maps on my own Polestar 2 while others are reporting the same. This change was not quite in lockstep with Android Auto, but it’s one of the fastest rollouts in recent years for a feature of this kind.

When you open Google Maps, the sidebar will appear when you tap the yellow hazard triangle. From here you can tap a specific incident to report including a crash, general congestion, roadworks, lane closures, stalled vehicles, objects in the road, or even mobile speed cameras. One of the limitations is that you can only make one report per road in our brief testing – so that is something to bear in mind.