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Sat Nav: essential or potentially dangerous? Share your thoughts in the HEXUS forum.
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Sat Nav: essential or potentially dangerous? Share your thoughts in the HEXUS forum.
I drive a lorry and use a sat-nav EVERYDAY , sat-navs are accurate BUT you also need to use your common sense to see if the road it's directing you down is fit for the vehicle you are driving !.
Too many people blindly follow the directions, Read the Road and take account of Road Signs !!!.
Totally agree with Dicko, the Sat-Nav is a tool to be used in parallel with maps, common sense and road markings/signs
I would comment, but calling the wife a sat nav might not go down well...
especially seeing as REAL women are terrible at reading maps and giving directions :p
Lead astray? Frequently - last example was when trying to use Google Maps to find directions to a hotel. It decided to lead us up a farm track to a house nearly a mile from the actual location of the hotel. Thankfully on that occasion I switched to ALK CoPilot, which got it right.Quote:
But that brings us neatly to our question of the week: has your sat-nav ever led you astray? Have you suffered from out-of-date maps? Or is common sense all that's required to make the most of GPS navigation?
Out-of-date maps? Likewise, frequently - trying using Google Maps to go from the Forth Road Bridge towards Glasgow and you'll apparently be going cross country - despite that the (major) road that you're using being there for a year or two.
So given #1 and #2, if you blindly follow the Sat Nav then you deserve to end up in a river!
No the ones that amuse me (frequently) is when you decide to divert from the set route, and the 'nav insists on you turning around and darn well follow the route it sets! Even if you're practically at your destination. :p
Oh, disclaimer, never had a "proper" sat nav, instead I've used nav apps on tablets (Nokia 770) or smartphones (Symbian and Android).
Phew, I thought I was the problem then.Quote:
Originally Posted by Biscuit
A satnav is an AID to navigation, nothing more.
Yes.
A couple of years ago my wife rented a holiday cottage in Devon. she stayed there with for the week with our Son and her parents, but I could not take the time off work, so I went down there the first weekend to drop her off, and came back the following weekend to collect her.
First weekend she map read with a paper road atlas. The route was a fairly simple one. Along the M4, Down the M5, turn off and do about 30 miles on a major road, then turn off that and do about 3 miles on minor roads.
For the second weekend I knew that I could not safely drive and map read at the same same time, so I used the sat-nav feature on my Nokia phone. Until the M5, it took me along the same route, but then it had me leave the M5 a junction early. After that it sent me along at least 30 miles of very small country lanes, many so narrow that it would have been impossible to pass an oncoming car (or more likely a tractor). The sat nav got me there in the end, but it took ages, at the slow speed I had to do on those tiny roads, and all the time I was worried that if I had a problem I was miles from any help or anyone finding me.
Shouldn't the government see this as an opportunity to permanently ban unsafe drivers and utter knuckle dragging morons from the roads instead?Quote:
Originally Posted by hexus
Seriously, anyone that drives their van down a cycle path because their sat nav told them to simply deserves a permanent ban from driving.
Have found google maps/navigation most accurate in terms of routing. My snooper had cr4p routing and my co-pilot live android app is much improved but I still have to be careful. If google nav could overlay speed cameras from a regularly updated database such as pocket gps world, it would be near perfect. Co-pilot live is the best overall compromise for nav, speed cameras, looks and ease of use however, being very good at all. IMHO.
I used to have a Nokia X6 and Ovi maps on that is absolutely fantastic , I've now upgraded to a Nokia 800 Lumia and the Nokia Drive is nowhere near as good as the Ovi Maps software BUT the GPS lock on works in seconds and also inside buildings and tunnels.
But the sat nav companies are missing a big business here as dedicated sat navs for HGV with , road weights , bridge heights / weights , road widths etc would make them a LOT of money !.
only once...an old TomTom sent me up a tiny road with a mahoosive hill and we got stuck....
Sat navs are good in area's you may have never been to before but as others say, use them along with common sense. Only issue I had with my old sat nav is that the maps were stupidly out of date and half the places I went never existed on the sat nav maps. The price of map updates were as much as a new unit so I just stopped getting the updates and passed the sat nav onto my brother who needed one at the time.
Will wait for sales or a dire need for one before I purchase another sat nav any time soon.
Saw any Moose on the way up??:pQuote:
Originally Posted by 3dcandy
The problem with many SatNavs IMO is that they try to take which way you go out of your hands - e.g. they try to give directions but have little flexibility over which route you want to take. I much prefer just using Google Maps as a map - unfortunately it still lacks route microadjustment but you can at least just turn on the GPS and have it track your journey, with a blue line indicating its preferred route (which is normally pretty good) and an arrow showing your direction, which means you always know where you are because it's like reading a map, and so you can make hour own, informed decisions about which way you want to go.
I thought they all could recalculate on the fly? So you just go the way you want and they'll adjust.Quote:
Originally Posted by miniyazz
I heard a radio interview the other day from the boss of company that make tech for the HGV industry.Quote:
Originally Posted by d1ck0
He said that they would love to make such a device, and there are plenty of haulage companies (and bus companies) who would be willing to pay for it. The problem is that they can't get the info with any reliability.
The major suppliers of GIS data (Navteq, the Ordnance survey) just report bridge heights and weight limits where there are warning signs, and they only appear on major routes and if the council think it is worth it. They almost never appear on minor roads and residential streets, but that is the kind of info many transport companies need. If you are going to delver a mail order washing machine it a 10 ton HGV, then it is worth knowing if one route into the housing estate has a width restriction so you need to go the other way. Same if you are delivering some pallet to a business unit on a farm in the back of beyond.
Snooper make sat navs for lorries. You can input your vehicle width, height and weight and it will not route you over/under bridges, down roads etc that are not suitable for your vehicle. I think it is called 'truckmaster' or something. You can turn lorry mode off and it will go into car mode so you use it in your car without the restrictions too.Quote:
Originally Posted by chrestomanci
That may well be for the 'proper' Sat Navs - however IMO there should be the capability to sort out your route before starting it.Quote:
Originally Posted by kalniel
ALK too - see http://www.copilotlive.com/uk/truck/ and it supports a good selection of platforms too - (Windows, WinMo, iOS, Android).Quote:
Originally Posted by Noli
Both Google Maps (free on my Android phone) and CoPilot recalculate on-the-fly the way Kaniel says.Quote:
Originally Posted by miniyazz
If I pick you up right, what you're asking for is an editable preview of the route - with most I've seen you can do this, to an extent, by setting up a multi-waypoint journey. Google Maps (tablet version) shows a selection of routes you can pick from, but it doesn't support those multi-waypoint journeys. CoPilot, on the other hand, does - and also allows you to say that you want to avoid a particular road ("Detour" option). I'm sure one of my earlier Nav apps - can't remember whether it was the older CoPilot or the one I had on the Nokia 770 - allowed you to show a map and define stops by pointing, before rearranging into a sensible route.
As I've said before, Google Maps is great if you want a once-a-year or a very basic routing. On the other hand, if your demands are a bit greater then it's possibly worth spending £20-30 on a "proper" Nav app. IMHO of course. ;)
Edit: just tried the latest version of Google Maps for the desktop (http://maps.google.com) - the WebGL version - and that allows you to "hand edit" your routing by moving the "nodes" of the route around - it's really quite a nice feature (if you need it).
Yep. Mine decided to take me to the right street in the wrong town when in France on my motorbike last year. Cheapy satnav off ebuyer so shouldn't have expected much. Lesson learned. Best option for bike touring IMO is a netbook with autoroute on it. Stop every couple of hours, write the roads you plan to take on paper and stick it somewhere.
You're quite right - just had a look at CoPilot and it does look like it allows you to play with the route. If I wasn't such a cheapskate I'd probably even buy it :pQuote:
Originally Posted by crossy
Yup, the Google Maps actions available on desktop is exactly what I want the mobile version to do! I can at least have a scale on the mobile map now :)
In my home town, the GPS for everything is around 500 metres out of position. Delivery drivers are always lost! :o)
No, never. The verbal instructions can sometimes be ambiguous but other than that it's very reliable when coupled with common sense and reading the road, as d1ck0 said.
I tend to use google navigation alot, which I do like - but it has its bad points (quite a few) one of the main ones being, not knowing when a road is restricted etc.
So a couple of times, i've highlighted and reported the problems on the desktop version...never heard back from them though? lol I'll see in the future if the routing has changed.
I tend to use SatNavs as a thing to reaffirm that I am on track, rather than just following it. By that I mean I will look up the route of something in general (what M-Ways, or notice that I go past a few major roundabouts etc) on Google maps, then use the Satnav display to ensure that I am where I want to be. Rarely just listen to it, but when I have, never been led astray.
In terms of the routing, I remember on the old version of Nokia Maps that you could plan your journey offline (well, it was online, but offline from in the car), and add waypoints so that you could store a route. Then when you synchronised, then you could have that, if there was a particular way you always wanted to go. Was a good feature and gives you that piece of mind that you are going where you have decided.
JP
I love my satnav, without it I would still be lost on a road somewhere.
Thanks to Google Maps I stumbled on to the Welbeck Estate last year, right in to a garden party being hosted by William Parente. What I thought was a road (and Google Maps showed as a road) was, in fact, a private drive. Luckily they were a reasonable bunch. Thought I was going to get arrested or something, but the head of security just asked to see the map, then offered me a ride to the other end of the estate.
The thing is, it's only been a private residence since 2005. Before that it was owned by the MoD. What the hell was Google Maps doing marking the roads through it as public roads? I can imagine I'd have been in considerably more trouble if I'd stumbled on to an MoD base...
EDIT: http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&...-8&sa=N&tab=wl
That's where I was. The building labelled as 'Welbeck Defence Sixth Form College' was labelled as Welbeck Abbey last year (and is where I got caught). I was heading back up towards Worksop. All that land from the A60 to the College Pines Golf Course is private.