I usually set my vehicle clock ahead too be early to places. I used to set it areas 5 mins but in a few weeks it’d be 7-8 minutes ahead.
In: Technology
Short answer: Yes, your watch and your truck clock *should* stay perfectly together all the time. If they don’t, at least one of them is not keeping good time.
Longer answer: Almost all clocks are based on making something wiggle back and forth and counting how many times it wiggles. In an old-fashioned grandfather clock, the thing that wiggles–“oscillates” in technical terms–is the pendulum that you can see swinging. In a mechanical watch, there’s a tiny wheel inside that spins back and forth against a spring. In an electronic watch, there’s an even tinier quartz tuning fork.
The problem is that it’s very hard to make something that oscillates at *exactly the same* rate under *all conditions*. Changes in temperature, in particular, have been a pain in the butt for clockmakers for *centuries* and they still are.
I’m guessing your Garmin watch has a receiver that can pick up the time signal from GPS satellites. Those satellites have *very expensive* clocks on board which are *very accurate*. Your watch can use the signal from those space clocks to correct itself every day, so it doesn’t need to be able to keep perfect time on its own. It just has to stay “close enough” until it can check the GPS satellite again.
Your truck clock, on the other hand, is probably cheaply made. If so, then it might not be very accurate to begin with, and probably is vulnerable to temperature changes.
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