Live exploration

Live exploration plays your drive as a 3D scene, so you see the forecast where and when it happens rather than as a line of numbers: the rain as you reach it, fog closing in ahead, the sun low in front of you late in the afternoon. Everything in it comes from your drive’s own forecast.

Open it

1. Open a drive

   In Drives, open a drive and wait for its forecast.

2. Tap Explore live

   On iPhone, on the drive card under the map; on an iPad or a Mac, at the top of the drive, beside its menu (•••). It is also in that menu. On Android, on the drive’s card, and in the drive’s menu.

After restarting the app on iPhone, iPad or Mac, opening a saved drive also reloads its detailed route. Until that finishes, Explore live is unavailable. If you are offline, you can still read the cached forecast; reconnect and refresh the drive to explore it.

A drive whose forecast has not arrived yet cannot be explored: there would be nothing true to draw. Tap × to go back to the drive. On Android, Back closes the layers menu if it is open, and otherwise goes back to the drive.

Play, scrub and step

The car drives the route at the times in your plan, and waits where your plan stops. Tap play to start, or drag along the timeline to go anywhere on the drive; the buttons either side of play jump to the previous and next moment. Under the timeline are the time at the car, how long you have been driving and the speed.

The pace button cycles through:

AUTO

Slows down near a moment or weather worth seeing, and speeds through calm road. The default.

REAL

Real time, at the road speed your drive was planned at.

×5 TO ×480

A fixed number of times real time.

Above the timeline, the caption says which moment you are at, or what comes next and when; tap its time to jump there.

What the panel shows

WIND

The speed and gusts, and where the wind comes from, relative to the car.

SEE

How far you can see, with the chance of rain or how cloudy it is.

ROAD

The road’s height, and how steeply it climbs or falls, from the map’s terrain.

SUN / MOON

How high the sun stands and where, relative to the car; after dark, the moon and how much of it is lit.

The round dial beside the panel is the sky around the car: the sun and moon where they stand, the wind arriving from its side, and north.

What the scene shows

• Rain and snow fall at the forecast’s rate and drift with its wind; a low chance makes them fainter.
• Fog closes in at the forecast’s visibility.
• The light is the sun’s or the moon’s for that time and place, with shadows when the sky is clear enough.
• A chip in the sky names the next weather worth knowing about, how far off it is and which way. Tap it to jump there.
• Pins on the road mark the moments ahead.
• When the sun or moon is off screen, a chip at the edge points to it; tap it to look that way.

Cameras and looking around

The camera control at the bottom right chooses where you watch from: Driver, low behind the car looking down the road; Follow, higher, with more of the road ahead; and Overview, the whole drive. At a fast pace the driver’s camera rises so the road stays readable.

Drag the scene to look around the car. Back to the road brings the camera back, and while the drive is playing it comes back on its own after a few seconds.

Layers

The layers button at the top right turns each part of the scene on and off: Rain and snow, Fog, Sun and moon and Wind, then the map’s Terrain and 3D buildings. Wind starts off; turned on, it shows the weather model’s wind for the hour you are driving, and says when the model does not reach your drive yet and shows today’s instead.

From the same menu, Moments on this drive lists every moment with its time and place, and How the forecast is drawn shows the forecast’s numbers behind what you see.

Moments

Live exploration finds the moments in your forecast: leaving and arriving, where weather starts, changes and clears, the worst of it, the highest point of the drive, strong crosswinds, a risk of ice, first light, sunrise, sunset and dark, a low sun ahead, moonrise, your stops, and where the clocks change. No two are closer than four minutes apart.