Watch counts steps and floors during driving

That is a great interim solution. I'll take anything at this point. But it should not be the final solution is what I'm saying. It's asking a lot of on the go and busy  consumers to remember to do this every time they enter a car.

Tweaking algorithms is what we software engineers are paid well to do. If they are scared to break algorithms to implement functionality then there are bigger issues at Garmin :)

I don't completely buy into the argument that cars blocking GPS is a major impediment here. I routinely use GPS in every car I am in and have never had an issue to the extent I didn't know my approximate speed. Sure there are exception cases but these should not inhibit a more generalized solution for most use cases.

These watches have a ton of sensors. It's unimaginable they can't detect driving. There **is** a way to do this, and I hope they are at least looking into it.

Also - roller blading and biking at these high speeds is another exception case. In the vast majority of cases people are not anywhere approaching speeds of 40+mph. Yes it happens sometimes maybe on a very steep and long decline. But if Garmin could factor out the majority of erroneously calculated steps (limiting misattributed steps to the margins of extreme sports or extreme athletes) - we would still be better off. The exception case people can easily use the manual feature you are proposing.

In any case- I am sitting here laughing right now that I bought a $1000 sports smart watch that is unusable in the common case that you drive a car. I guess I have to buy an Apple Watch which appears to be mostly immune to these issues.

I’ve never  experienced  this, are there more people that has this issue that you know of , or is it something wrong with your watch.

have you checked with Garmin?

In my case it happens on certain stretches of road while driving, both in the alley behind my building and on the freeway when commuting to and from work. I've also seen the watch add over 1000 steps and a floor climbed while on a four-hour drive from California to Nevada.

4113794 said:

An easy fix for this would be to allow the user to disable activity tracking (preferably from a hot key) so steps and floors aren't counted while driving.

Or just start the Driving activity, while driving. If the Driving activity is not available on your watch, use for example Indoor Cycling - it also disables the steps counting. Indoor Cycling, unlike the standard cycling, will not consume much energy, since the GPS stays off. You can discard the activity at the end, if you do not need to keep it as a log of your drives.

Another solution is changing the shock absorbers

trux said:

Another solution is changing the shock absorbers

I know that was written in jest, but the problem has nothing to do with the shocks -- at the right speed, the length of the concrete freeway segments combined with the expansion joints between them produce a rhythmic motion that the watch interprets as walking.

MisterFrag said:

I know that was written in jest, but the problem has nothing to do with the shocks -- at the right speed, the length of the concrete freeway segments combined with the expansion joints between them produce a rhythmic motion that the watch interprets as walking.

Yes, it was a joke. But you are exactly right. And a good suspension will take care of it  I have excellent experience for example with the hydropneumatic suspension of Citroen DS - the car of Fantomas, Mitterrand, and other celebrities. But frankly told, my 21 years old Škoda does not generate more than some 50 steps on a 1200 km long highway trip either, and trips on small field and mountain roads do not trigger much more. And I did not change the suspension on it yet.

The watch could "sniff" the presence of car Bluetooth device and disable tracking if present. This wouldn't even require pairing, just periodic scan for the car's Bluetooth MAC address.

8502147 said:

I guess I have to buy an Apple Watch which appears to be mostly immune to these issues.

Late to the party on this but it takes moments to search to see that the Apple Watch (Fitbit etc) also miscounts steps - https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8130980

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250192608

Driving on bumpy roads should be easy for the watch to identify even without GSP/speed: the movements are likely to be rather random and bumpy, very different from the regular swinging and up&down of walking. Whe you start driving and the watch notices iregular movements, the watch could prompt you to confirm that you are driving. That might not work all the time, namely on smooth roads as the watch is designed to measure every single step. But it would at least discard thousands of steps and floors climbed when driving on dirt roads.