As long as you had internet connection at the start of your journey it worked for navigation, even if you dropped offline during your trip. Therefore downloadi

As long as you had internet connection at the start of your journey it worked for navigation, even if you dropped offline during your trip. Therefore downloading maps was useful at the time because if you didn't do this, you could be driving blind for a while in areas where there was no internet connection. You could only download small sections of the map at 1 time for offline use (e.g. an area just bigger than Manhattan). Still it was a total PITA given that most other navigation apps at the time allowed you to download maps and start navigation even if you were offline. Of course, if you did that all the time Google wouldn't be able to collect data on you to support its business model, which is probably why they've taken so many years to get around to implementing this.