How to Drive a GPX or Google Maps Route With Rally-Style Callouts
A route from a GPX file or a shared link is not yet a drive. Here is what the format actually contains and how to follow it by ear instead of by screen.
Someone hands you a route: a GPX file attached to a forum post, a Google Maps link from a friend, a track downloaded from a club’s ride list. Before you can drive it well, two separate problems need solving. First, what does that file actually contain, and will it open the way you expect? Second, how do you turn a static line on a map into something you can follow by ear, corner by corner, without staring at a phone mounted on the dash?
What a GPX file actually contains
GPX stands for GPS Exchange Format, an open XML standard published by TopoGrafix, with the current 1.1 schema released in August 2004. Every coordinate in a GPX file uses the WGS84 datum and every measurement is metric, so the numbers stay consistent no matter which app produced the file.
A GPX file can hold three different kinds of data, and the difference matters more than it looks:
- Waypoints (
wpt) are single pinned points: a fuel stop, a viewpoint, a hazard marker. - Routes (
rte) are an ordered sequence of points meant to be followed in order. - Tracks (
trk), built from one or more segments (trkseg), are the recorded or planned path itself.
This is defined precisely in the GPX 1.1 schema. A file made only of waypoints is not a route at all, just a scatter of pins. The OpenStreetMap wiki notes that OpenStreetMap’s own importer rejects waypoint-only files for exactly this reason. If a GPX file someone sends you opens as dots instead of a line, that is usually why.
Where a route actually comes from
“Send me the route” rarely produces a clean GPX file, because most of the tools people actually use were not built to export one.
| Source | Exports GPX directly? | What you actually get |
|---|---|---|
| Google Maps share link | No | A link to a place or a set of directions, not a file |
| Google My Maps | No | KML/KMZ, or CSV per layer |
| Strava | Yes | Route geometry, lighter than the same platform’s TCX or FIT export |
| Komoot and similar route planners | Often, format varies by tool | Usually the planned line; whether waypoints and cues survive the export is worth checking per tool |
| Club or forum attachment | Usually yes | A GPX file already produced by one of the tools above |
A Google Maps share link, the kind generated from the app’s share sheet and starting with maps.app.goo.gl or google.com/maps, points to a place or a set of directions rather than a
downloadable file, and Google Maps has no built-in GPX export. Google My Maps, a separate product
for building custom maps, exports to KML/KMZ or CSV instead. That gap is why a whole category of
small converter sites exists purely to turn a Google Maps link into a GPX file for other apps; they
change often, so treat any specific one as a snapshot rather than a lasting recommendation.
Fitness platforms are more generous. Strava’s GPX export drops the heart rate, cadence and power data carried in its own TCX export, but the route geometry survives intact. Route planners built for cycling and hiking generally offer GPX too, though exactly what survives the export varies by tool.
Why the format matters before you drive
None of this is pedantry. A file that looks fine in a map preview can still cause a bad drive if the app on the other end has to guess what you meant.
A track built from GPS recordings can wander: a parked stop, a wrong turn that got corrected, a signal glitch that puts one point briefly in the wrong field. A hand-drawn route can skip a road that actually exists, or follow one a car cannot legally use. And because different tools drop different details on export, a route that looked complete in the app that made it can arrive elsewhere missing the detail that mattered, like which turn was intended at a complex junction.
None of this makes a GPX file untrustworthy. It means the honest habit is to import it, look at it, and confirm it does what you think it does, rather than trusting a file’s origin over its actual content.
From a route to a callout-guided drive
Having a valid route solves the first problem. The second, turning it into something you can follow without staring at the screen, is a different job.
Krace imports a route directly from a GPX file or from a Google Maps share link, and can also build one from scratch by dropping points on a map. Once a route is loaded, it can be previewed and simulated before you start driving, which is the moment to catch a route that looks wrong. During the drive itself, Krace speaks rally-style corner callouts and retimes them against your current speed rather than firing on a fixed countdown, so a call timed for 40 km/h does not arrive too early or too late at 80 km/h.
A call like this describes a moderately tight right corner followed immediately by a more open left, borrowing the shorthand of a competitive rally crew for an ordinary road, not the speeds a rally stage is driven at. Our guide to rally pace notes breaks that vocabulary down call by call if you want to understand it fully.
Building or searching a route needs a connection, since the map and route data come from a live service. Once a drive has started, callout delivery relies on GPS positioning rather than a constant connection, which matters most on the kind of rural or mountain road where a route worth importing often ends up.
Staying legal while a phone talks
Using an app to speak callouts is only useful if it does not become the thing that gets you into trouble. In Germany, paragraph 23 of the StVO permits a driver to use an electronic device’s voice control and read-aloud function, but only on the condition that the device is never picked up or held while driving. The same paragraph separately allows a brief, road-appropriate glance at a mounted device, a different condition not needed here since a spoken callout requires no glance at all. This is German law specifically; if you are driving elsewhere, check the equivalent local rule before assuming it applies.
Sources
From the Krace blog
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