@ColinTheMathmo Personal experience is that my sense of direction, while always poor, became:
• worse when using GPS while driving (navigation in Google Maps) with the default settings,
• better (than ever) when using GPS/Maps while driving, with the orientation fixed to North.
I can strongly recommend the latter; I'm gaining a sense of direction that I never had before.
The main change is that the arrow will e.g. point to the left/right/down depending on whether I'm driving west/east/south, but this way I get instant feedback (e.g. I was driving west and just now I turned left, so I'm now driving south), and get to check my sense of direction against reality, and stay oriented in my head. Something I was never able to do earlier (had no sense of where different places were relative to each other). Strongly recommended.