I was involved in a fender bender this morning and was interested in seeing what the data from Automatic showed in terms of where the incident occurred. Imagine my surprise when I opened Automatic to find that the route that was mapped by the app was completely wrong.

Take a look. The dotted red line is the route I actually took, but Automatic logged it as having taken completely different freeways. The other interesting thing to note is that it marked B and C as the points in which the crash happened in the #4 lane (of a 5 lane highway), then I drove it off to the shoulder, just past the 5 lane. However, Automatic indicated I drove further up the freeway, took an exit, then came back to a residential area instead.

The same phenomena occurred when I got back on the freeway (from the shoulder) to resume my drive to work. Automatic showed me driving surface streets to get on the freeway, which I never did. Again, the red dotted line shows the path I actually took.

I thought for a moment that perhaps the stop on the freeway confused the app, since well, you’re not supposed to stop on the freeway so it dropped me into the residential area. However, I took another drive later in the afternoon that was routed like this:

The dotted red line is the actual path that I drove (only surface streets) to get from point A to point B. However, Automatic thought I took a completely different route, going through the freeway.

O__o