We hope this is the start of something bigger and with more car brands, but for now, the Google Maps experience on Polestar cars will look a touch more custom. Google and Polestar announced this week that they worked together on a customized Google Maps design that will rollout to all Polestar vehicles.
While the customizations here are minimal and really only appear to be the adoption of Polestar’s signature orange color with sharper, more rectangular buttons, it does indeed match the rest of their software UI. That software is a part of the cars with Google built-in experience. You can see the change in the image above, and it looks nice enough.
The news came from Polestar (on LinkedIn) who was speaking at SXSW London, so we have no idea if Google plans to do something similar with other cars that have Google built-in. And that’s what we’re talking about here – not Android Auto.
For Polestar owners, this should rollout “in the coming weeks.” As a Polestar 2 owner, this is nice to see, but man, can we get a system OTA update already? It has been 11 months in the US without one. That’s pathetic.
Google Maps needs to put work in allowing us to report speed traps, traffic jams, construction zones, and accidents from the Android Auto interface in the dashboard rather than having to open Google Maps on our phone and then reporting incidents.
They have added this feature. Little yellow triangle with an exclamation upper right hand corner.