In general, if you have the cartesian coordinates of a moving vehicle at any point in time you can, as I said earlier, convert to spherical (or more precisely, geodetic) coordinates without any particular loss of precision.
It is still not clear to me what precisely you (or your friend) are thinking about. Perhaps you are thinking of vehicles that are only slowly (or not at all) accelerating. If you know that the vehicle at time t0 was at position r0 moving with velocity v, then we can approximate the position of the vehicle for times t close to t0 using an expression like rt = r0 + vt (with r and v being vectors). If you now would like a similar expression for the coordinates in spherical (or geodetic) coordinates, your friend is correct that you could transform the velocity as well to get a similar expression. However, since spherical and geodetic coordinates are "curved" while cartesian coordinates are "straight", spherical coordinates from such an expression, would in general be precise for a smaller period of time around t0 compared to the expression in cartesian coordinates. You could also try to get a more precise expression, but again, most non-trivial motions that are simple to describe in straight coordinates are often complicated to describe in curved coordinates, and visa versa.
It may also be that you friend is thinking about the Coriolis force or something similar? If you still want to pursue the mater, I'm afraid you will need to elaborate a bit more.