It's the summer. It's Fourth of July weekend. And that means Americans are hitting the road to vacations and family gatherings. We wanted to find out: What's the fastest way to get there?
We now rely so much on phone-based navigation apps to get us where we're going that long gone is the world of paper maps.
So which navigation app is the best at getting us where we wanted to go? People certainly have their opinion of which app they think is best. But when have people really been able to test this out by sending multiple cars at the same time to the same destination? This is what we did.
I used Google Maps. Nick Wells used Waze – which is owned by Google parent Alphabet but operates independently and competitively. And our producer Betsy Spring used Apple Maps. We all started at the same place, at the same time. We didn't race in traffic. We picked a set of destinations and followed the maps exactly. We wanted to see which map would give the fastest route. In addition, we also wanted to see which map would give the most accurate time estimate before we started driving.