If you are new to the world of Android Auto, you probably think that it all comes down to plugging in your Android smartphone, launching the app on the head unit, and then relying on touch input or voice commands to interact with apps when parked or in motion.

In theory, that’s how Android Auto is supposed to work in the first place, but in practice, things are completely different, as users come across more or less critical problems every once in a while.

One of the most recent, for example, concerns the voice input and the location-based services, and someone discovered (and others confirmed) that Google Assistant can no longer determine their location and therefore provide relevant data to the driver.

For example, Google Assistant should theoretically let you search for gas stations with just a single voice command. All you have to do is thus to prompt the assistant to “show nearby gas stations,” with the search to then be conducted automatically and the gas stations close to you to then be displayed in Google Maps right on your head unit running Android Auto.

But as some people found out the hard way, this feature no longer works because Google Assistant can’t determine their location.

So instead of showing the results for the actual location, Google Assistant only displays items around their homes, even though they’re not anywhere close to it.

At the first glance, Google Assistant can’t determine the current location of the user, which seems to signal there’s a permission error on these phones. But it isn’t, as everything is said to be configured correctly, so in theory, it all comes down to a bug that Google needs to fix.

The good news is that a member of the Android Auto team has already confirmed the issue has been forwarded to those in charge of fixing it, though for now, there’s no ETA as to when a patch could land.

In the meantime, there’s not much you can do, other than downgrading to an earlier version of the Google app (which powers the Google Assistant experience), though this also seems to produce mixed results for users out there.

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