Lost Your Car? Google Maps Might Help

Google Maps has, for years now, been the savior of directionally challenged people everywhere, and it just got even better. As WIRED says, “There’s far more data beneath the surface, information not just about the layout of roadways but also the logic of how you’d connect from one to another.” Google puts an incredible amount of energy, money, resources and data into Google Maps.

Thanks to a new update that was made without fanfare, it will now help you remember where you parked. As Fox News points out, “But Google isn’t quite ahead of the curve here. This update comes a year after Apple Maps introduced its Parked Location feature, which automatically marks a car’s location when an iPhone is disconnected from Bluetooth or CarPlay.” We posted about this in October 2016 for iOS users.

When you get wherever you’re going, if you’ve got the app pulled up, you can simply tap the blue “pin” to mark your location and Google will save it, replacing the standard pin with a big red “P” on the map.

Of course, if you find yourself in a multi-level parking garage, that alone would not provide you with enough information to quickly and easily locate your vehicle again. But the change also allows you to take photos of your car or other surroundings, type notes and append these to the pin for recall later if you need a hint.

That’s huge, and it just made travel into any cityscape a whole lot easier, especially if it’s an area you’re not that familiar with in the first place.

As an added bonus, if you’ve parked somewhere and had to feed money into a parking meter, you can plug in the time on the meter as you walk away. Google Maps will offer a running countdown that shows how much time you have remaining on the meter before it needs to be fed again, which is another tremendous convenience.

For the moment, the updates are only available for Android devices and only working on Google Maps, version 9.49. However, as soon as this latest version makes its way through the Apple iStore’s approval process, Apple users will be able to enjoy the latest benefit as well.

Business travel, especially to a city you’re not familiar with, can be a frustrating experience, but thanks to these changes, it just got a little less so!