How to Use Your iPhone to Find Your Parked Car

Here is a guide to using your iPhone to never lose where you parked your car.

When we are on road trips and in foreign areas that we aren’t familiar with, finding your parked car can truly be a hassle. Your iPhone is great at utilizing its location services for giving you directions and showing you nearby restaurants

When you are using Maps to locate your destination, you can also use it to remember where you left your car but using Bluetooth and CarPlay!

How to Use Your iPhone to Find Your Parked Car

Here are the steps to enable Showing Parked Location when using CarPlay and Maps.

Watch the above video for more information on how to remind you of where you parked your car.

Enabling Show Parked Location in Maps

When we are navigating to our destination, Siri is quick to inform us of where to turn next by using Maps yet we can also enable an option in Maps to Show Parked Location. Navigate to the settings for the Maps app within your Settings application.

After the list of Maps Extensions you will see a slider marked for Show Parked Location. It can be enabled and will let you know below that “Your parked car will be shown on the map if your location can be determined when parking. A connection to your car’s bluetooth or CarPlay stereo is required.”

If you are using Maps to locate your destination and using your Bluetooth or CarPlay features, you will be able to have Maps remember your parked location when you turn off the car. This is a perfect feature for parking near hiking trails or at a baseball stadium or anywhere you are not familiar with.

When you check your Maps application after the fact, you will see a notification from Maps letting you know that your car location has been saved and is available for you to use to track it.

How to Find Your Car Without Carplay or Bluetooth

There are still plenty of us that use iPhones and do not have the abilities to enable CarPlay or even a bluetooth connection that still may want to locate our parked vehicles. Fortunately there are workarounds and multiple third party solutions that can be used to triangulate where you left your car and help you return to it.

One workaround within Maps is to drop a pin on the location you are currently parked. Maps will allow you to name this location for later use and you can tag it “Parked Car” if you would like. This way when you are finished with your hike, you can look up this dropped pin later and have a good idea of where you left your car. These locations can be shared or saved with friends to make sure you don’t lose your way.

Another work around is to take a picture of your car and ensure that Location Services is enabled in Settings for your Camera. That way you can use the location data from the picture to see this spot on Maps and find your car.

The App Store has a couple of solutions available to you for finding your parked vehicle including TrakCar (with Apple Watch support), Find Your Car with AR (using augmented reality to tag your car location) and many more. Most of them are free for you to download and use and  will accomplish the same thing as the Maps over pin variety. The only catch is needing to open another application upon parking.

Using our iPhones to be able to track our locations can be very life-saving in situations where you would normally wander around a parking lot for hours clicking your keys to find your car. If you are currently using your iPhone for navigation in your car either with Bluetooth or Carplay, this feature will surely come in handy sometime soon.

What's New in iOS 11.4.1

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The iOS 11.4 update added Messages in iCloud and AirPlay 2, but it also brought issues along with it. The iOS 11.4.1 update keeps these long anticipated features and includes fixes for some iOS 11.4 problems.  Specifically the iOS 11.4.1 update; Fixes an issue that prevented some users from viewing the last known location of their AirPods in Find My iPhone.  Improves reliability of syncing mail, contacts and notes with Exchange accounts.   This update also includes other bug fixes and security upgrades. It's possible that this update includes a fix for bad iOS 11.4 battery life.  Messages in the Cloud allows you to backup your iMessage conversations to the cloud just like you back up your notes, contacts and photos. This means they are backed up in case something happens to your phone, but that's not all.  Messages in the Cloud syncs deleted messages and threads across your iCloud devices. This means everything will show up the same across your Apple devices. With this in place you should see the same conversations everywhere, all of the time.  This also backs up the photos and attachments in the cloud so you have more room on your iPhone or iPad. When you get a new device all of the messages sync to that device so you don't lose anything.

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