Finding true north

Research is confirming what we've demonstrated empirically, that people who are lost will walk in circles, all the while convinced that they're walking in a straight line.
Recently, my wife's car, a 2000 Avalon, needed a new alternator, requiring that the battery be disconnected while the mechanic worked on the car. As a result, the cool dashboard display widgets needed to be reset. Setting the date and time wasn't much a problem. We drove away, everything fine until we noticed that the on-board compass was off by about 110^°. We'd be going north and the compass read southwest.
After mucking around with the controls for a very long time, we finally reached the end of the line, the bleak wilderness of unknowing that brought us to the next desperate step - we read the fine manual. (For the record, Sandra and I have a combined 60 years of technical writing experience.)
Here's what we found:

Drive in circles. That's what they tell us to do. Drive in circles until the car figures out where magnetic north is located.
A 10-year-old car with 150,000 miles can find north by going in circles. As humans, we go in circles and all we find is more circles.
Oh, and did you like the nice way that Toyota suggests that we obey traffic laws and run into or over people or things during this calibration drill?