Google Maps has stopped showing its familiar traffic lines on Android Auto for a number of drivers, even though the same green, yellow, orange and red shading still loads normally when Maps is opened directly on a phone.
The reports describe the overlay disappearing specifically inside the car’s display: the road shading that flags congestion vanishes from the in-dash map, while the phone sitting in the same cupholder keeps showing it correctly. Several drivers trace the Android Auto traffic lines issue to the Immersive Navigation update, though Google has not confirmed that the update is the cause.
Not the first time Android Auto traffic lines have broken
This is not the first time traffic lines have gone missing from Google Maps. Google had already fixed a bug that stripped the same colour-coded overlay from Android, iOS and desktop, only for it to resurface on Android Auto specifically, AndroidAuthority reports. That timing is what makes this outage different from an ordinary rollout hiccup: the underlying feature was broken, repaired, and is now broken again in a different part of the same app. Drivers who rely on Android Auto for turn-by-turn navigation are the ones losing the feature, since the phone version keeps working normally.
For a system people use specifically to avoid reaching for a phone while driving, losing the ability to see where a jam is forming is more than a cosmetic glitch. Traffic shading is what tells a driver whether to peel off onto an alternate route before they are stuck in it, not after.
The two bugs are related but distinct: the earlier one affected every version of Maps, this one is confined to Android Auto, and there is no indication yet that it will spread back to phones or desktop.
Where the reports are landing
The complaints are collected in a Google support forum thread titled “Traffic not displaying on Android Auto with new immersive maps,” which ties them directly to the Immersive Navigation rollout rather than a general Maps outage. Reports describing the same pattern have also surfaced across the Android Auto community and other driver forums: traffic shading present on the phone, absent on the car display, with no setting or restart that brings it back.
Traffic-data problems in Google Maps have been surfacing on and off for about a month now. This is the latest instance of the same underlying system misbehaving in a new place rather than in a new way, and it lands on the one surface, the car dashboard, where a driver has the least ability to work around it by picking up their phone instead.
What to watch next
The bug does not appear to affect every Android Auto user, which points to a partial rollout rather than a global outage. That pattern usually means the fix, when it lands, arrives the same way: pushed silently to affected accounts without a changelog entry, rather than through an app update drivers have to install themselves.
Google has not posted a fix or a public acknowledgement on the support thread. The company resolved the phone and desktop version of this bug through a server-side update rather than an app release, so that thread, and any change in Google’s release notes for Android Auto, are the most likely places a fix will show up first.
