Both of mine died lately and I want to get them working again, but qmk is a nightmare I don’t want to have to touch again.

I am astounded people managed to drive around Japan without gps. The signage is awful here. Even with gps it can be a struggle at times.

Purely theoretical as I don’t have any sources on how cars are doing this, but they could be communicating over low band networks similar to how Amazon home devices make a mesh network. Your car could send data to another car of the same manufacturer, who then phones home that data.