Satellite navigation systems in cars (aka "Sat Nav")?

While it strikes me as potentially useful, I have heard people follow its suggestions literally even when they made no sense. An example was the story of the lorry driver who went down a street that was plainly too narrow and got jammed. Another example was the woman whose sat-nav system told her to drive through a river...she did and got swept upstream, ruining her car in the process. Don't forget the ambulance that took a needlessly long detour while taking someone to hospital. These are stories I've seen in the past few months out of the corner of my eye while browsing the internet.





Whatever happened to good old fashioned map reading?|||This is true, you do have to use some extra care using them. I can't help thinking that all cars will be built with them soon and they'll be used to collect more speeding fines from us one day. Another method of Big Brother watching us.|||A sat nav only works if the user has some modicum of common sense. unfortunately its human nature to listen to a machine (designed by other faulted human beings) that is meant to give you the 'best route'. the machine said it so it must be true! perhaps there should be a 'common sense' test before anyone is allowed to buy one?|||I've been using satnav for a while now to get to rugby grounds with my son and have never been given wrong directions by it but I still have a road atlas too......just in case.|||map reading in traffic is problematic and can be dangerous.


i recently used one of these things for a work activity which had me going to several sites in a city unfamiliar to me. it was so damn easy to do without having to read the map on the passenger seat and drive and watch out for other lost idiots (like me)


They still have one or two issues at the moment. like my one telling me to drive over a freeway on a pedestrian overpass, or to do a u-turn on the harbour bridge.


these are suggestions from this piece of technology, it takes a brain to make the best use of them. the brainless, or the hard of thinking amongst us will always have problems, even with maps.|||It is fast becoming a lost art, and most people are getting too lazy to use their brains to figure a route.|||Hiya. I work with an organisation that promotes all kinds of navigation - both electronic and human - and it's very true that there is a perception among drivers that once you have a satnav installed, you don't need to think about navigation any more. This is plainly gibberish - the machine is designed to be a navigation AID, not a replacement brain. We recently held a seminar for satnav makers and mapping companies, and they are working to make sure things like the examples you mention don't happen - the technology now exists to make roadwidth judgements and ensure the road is suitable for your vehicle, for instance. But it simply can't replace your brain.





My favourite example of satnav misuse used to be the one where the woman drove into the river, but I've got a better one now. This is absolutely true - I reported on it a couple of months ago. A woman following her satnav was told to take the next left turn. She obediently did so, which would have been fine, had she not been waiting at a level crossing at the time. It wasn't even an automatic level crossing. To obey her satnav, she had to get out of the car, open a gate, drive onto a RAILWAY TRACK, go back and close the gate after herself, turn left and drive up the track for two miles before thinking - get this - that "her satnav had steered her wrong".


She delayed trains for a couple of hours, but was released without charge because the police said it was an "honest mistake", if a very stupid one. They did tests, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with the satnav - except its inherent assumption of human intelligence, evidently.





But to answer your actual question, car insurance firm esure recently released a report they'd collated, claiming that "11 million Brits would now fail the Cub Scout map reading badge." Not Boy or Girl Scout, you understand - CUB Scout. What does that tell you about our "plug and play" society?|||whilst agreeing with you, have you not noticed that most of our road signs to places have mysteriously disappeared, you just cannot use road signs any longer.. they are not there...and the signs that are there are usually misleading and sometimes incorrect. what about getting the signs back .then we might not be so dependant on using sat navs .|||Map reading is all well and good, but listening to a voice is a lot safer, and easier than stopping every five minutes to read a map.





I think every satnav, when first activated, should be required by law to tell the driver to drive over the nearest 200ft cliff - that'd get rid of all the idiots overnight.|||sat navs do it for you becouse we are to lazy, and dont trust the sat nav, I got one for speed cameras only