How to track a parked car’s location on the iPhone

Your iPhone can automatically drop a pin in Apple Maps when parking your car. iOS infers this through your connection to your car audio system, relying on Bluetooth or CarPlay. When you disconnect or turn the car off and walk away, the location you left is where your iPhone believes you parked your car.

However, you might find that this feature isn’t working for you, as a family member did. In fact, they couldn’t even find the option, which is usually in Settings > Maps as Show Parked Location.

Apple mediates this feature through privacy settings. It requires that you have Settings > Privacy > Location Services turned on and that Settings > Privacy > Location Services > System Services > Significant Locations is also set to On.

The reason? Apple derives locations of importance to you through many signals and stores those in Significant Locations. It infers your home, work, school, and other significant places you visit repeatedly. iOS doesn’t drop a pin at any regularly visited location.

The notion must be the feature would be irritating for people with that feature turned off, as they would have a pin dropped every time they parked in front of their house or in a work parking lot. Thus, Apple doesn’t even make it available.

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