What Do Solar Storms Mean for GPS and Self-Driving Cars?
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Geomagnetic storms triggered by violent solar flares are causing deviations exceeding 10 meters in global positioning systems (GPS), threatening autonomous driving and precision agriculture technologies.
The GPS now guides the tractors to the centimeter and promises to orient the cars without a driver. But the Sun, when it unravels, blurs these signals from space. A geomagnetic storm has just proved it on the scale of a continent.
Across the US, GPS systems have been found to experience positioning errors exceeding 10 meters. Researchers reported that the disruption is strong enough to affect precision agricultural equipment and self-driving vehicles.
What Do Solar Storms Mean for GPS and Self-Driving Cars?
On August 29, 2026, researchers from The Aerospace Corporation, Boston University, Boston College, and MIT published a Geophysical Research Letters study showing that the November 2025 geomagnetic superstorm produced Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) positioning errors exceeding 10 meters in parts of the continental United States. The result makes the connection between GPS and self-driving cars more concrete because the measured error w…
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