TL;DR
- Google Maps on iOS has started showing new vehicle options for the navigation market.
- These join the three existing vehicle types, in addition to the default arrow.
- The new vehicle selections can be customized with the color of your choice.
What are you driving these days? Convertible? Plug-in electric? You’ve got some fantastic options out there, but none of them really take the form of a giant arrow with a circle around it. For many of us, though, that’s exactly the representation we see of our vehicle when navigating somewhere in Google Maps. If you’d rather have that experience better reflect what you’ve actually got out on the road, we might just have some good news for you.
Right now, Maps on Android does let you customize your vehicle — a little bit. If you’re just not feeling the arrow, you can swap that out for a red sedan, a yellow SUV, or a green pickup. That’s the way it’s been since 2020, and that’s the way it was looking like things were going to stay.
Well, that seems like it’s no longer the case, and Android Police noticed that Google Maps for iOS now offers a whole lot of new customization options for its vehicle marker. Those include not just several new, much more detailed vehicle models, but also the ability to recolor them. Sadly, that support doesn’t look like it’s coming to the old vehicles, which will be stuck on their original colors.
Even with that minor setback, this still looks like a very cool new addition that should make using Maps feel that much more personal. The options here may not be quite as fun as the sort of icons available from Waze, but this new set is totally workable, and should reflect real-world vehicles a lot better than our limited picks before. Hopefully it won’t be long before we see this change make its way from iOS over to Android.