An automotive navigation system is an element of the automobile controls or a third-party add-on accustomed find direction in an automobile. It typically uses a satellite navigation device to induce its position data which is then correlated to a foothold on a road. When directions are needed routing is calculated. On the fly traffic, information is often accustomed to adjusting the route.

Dead reckoning using distance data from sensors attached to the drivetrain, a gyroscope, and an accelerometer will be used for greater reliability, as GPS signal loss and/or multipath can occur because of urban canyons or tunnels.

Mathematically, automotive navigation is predicated on the shortest path problem, within graph theory, which examines a way to identify the trail that best meets some criteria (shortest, cheapest, fastest, etc.) between two points in an exceedingly large network.

Automotive navigation systems are crucial for the event of self-driving cars.

The road database could be a vector map. Street names or numbers and house numbers, still as points of interest (waypoints), are encoded as geographic coordinates. this permits users to search out the specified destination by address or as geographic coordinates. (See map management.)

Map database formats are almost uniformly proprietary, with no industry standards for satellite navigation maps, although some companies are attempting to deal with this with SDAL and Navigation Data Standard (NDS). Map data vendors like Tele Atlas and Navteq create the bottom map in a very GDF (Geographic Data Files) format, but each electronics manufacturer compiles it in an optimized, usually proprietary manner. GDF isn’t a CD standard for car navigation systems. GDF is employed and converted onto the CD-ROM within the internal format of the navigation system. CDF (Carin Database Format) could be a proprietary navigation map format created by Philips.

SDAL may be a proprietary map format developed by Navteq, which was released royalty-free within the hope that it’d become an industry standard for digital navigation maps, has not been very widely adopted by the industry.