This day Google finally updated the list to include the first 2022 coverage. The first update of the year is usually small and mostly consists into adding January 2022 in some countries. This update follows this rule however it still has some interesting additions.
Denmark
The country was removed from the list except the central and the northern regions which were extended to January.
France
The country was extended to January but it is very likely to be extended later.
Germany
The whole country was extended to March. As usual the pictures will not be published, Google only collect them to improves Maps.
Ireland
The whole country was removed from the list. Only Dublin stays in as a dedicated electric car drives here to measure air quality.
Italy
The country was extended to January but it is very likely to be extended later.
Japan
Japan entries now go up to June of 2022. Most of them go to March.
- Aichi, Gunma, Mie, Okayama, Okinawa, Saitama, Tochigi, Tokushima: extended to March
- Miyagi: added to the list up to end of February
- Chiba, Shizuoka: removed from the list
- Tokyo, Osaka: added to the list and / or extended to June
- Ibaraki, Kumamoto, Nagasaki, Saga: extended to February
Netherlands
The country was extended to February but it is very likely to be extended later. Google also fixed the entry with the misspelled country name (Netehrland -> Nederland), it was about time.
Portugal
The country was extended to January but it is very likely to be extended later. Azores are not back unfortunately.
South Africa
The most interesting change in this update. The whole country is now listed up to January. The date of start also changed to January 2021. As cars were spotted in the country during last year it was already known Google was driving here.
Note that all South African entries were updated, including old ones such as Kruger National Park that still has 2017 as a date of start. This means whoever made the changes simply updated all the entries at once without thinking so, even if new entries were added for all regions, do not expect everything to be updated. We still don’t know if the new pictures will be published anyways, pictures taken in 2020 and 2021 are still not available.
Spain
The whole country was extended to February but it is very likely to be extended again later.
United Arab Emirates
The emirate of Dubai got extended up to March. Last month the pickup with the Google Trekker was seen in International City, east of Dubai so we can confirm it still drives in this country.
United Kingdom
The whole country got removed from the list. Only Greater London stays for the whole year. This may suggest Google is assigning a dedicated car with air quality measurement system to the city, like for Dublin or Hamburg. The country will probably be added back later with new dates for 2022.
Keep in mind that Google doesn’t seem to take care of this list a lot. For example all entries for the United States and Brazil end in 2021 while cars are still driving in 2022 and some countries with continuous updates like Indonesia are simply not listed at all. This means this list is not complete or totally reliable which is a shame as it is literally the only official source we have.
That’s it for this first update of the year. Thank you for reading and see you next time!