News - QOTW: has your Sat Nav ever led you astray?

[HEXUS]

Sat Nav: essential or potentially dangerous? Share your thoughts in the HEXUS forum.

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[d1ck0]

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 !!!.

[Biscuit]

Totally agree with Dicko, the Sat-Nav is a tool to be used in parallel with maps, common sense and road markings/signs

[kalniel]

I would comment, but calling the wife a sat nav might not go down well...

[Biscuit]

especially seeing as REAL women are terrible at reading maps and giving directions

[crossy]

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 Have you suffered from out-of-date maps?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?

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.

Out-of-date maps?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.

Oh, disclaimer, never had a "proper" sat nav, instead I've used nav apps on tablets (Nokia 770) or smartphones (Symbian and Android).

[FRISH]

especially seeing as REAL women are terrible at reading maps and giving directions

Phew, I thought I was the problem then.

[blueball]

A satnav is an AID to navigation, nothing more.

[chrestomanci]

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.

[badass]

Vehicles on the road to nowhere are apparently becoming a common occurrence, so much so that the UK government will hold a summit in March in an attempt to tackle the issue of drivers being misdirected by out-of-date directions

Shouldn't the government see this as an opportunity to permanently ban unsafe drivers and utter knuckle dragging morons from the roads instead?
Seriously, anyone that drives their van down a cycle path because their sat nav told them to simply deserves a permanent ban from driving.

[Noli]

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.

[d1ck0]

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 !.

[3dcandy]

only once...an old TomTom sent me up a tiny road with a mahoosive hill and we got stuck....

[Grey M@a]

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.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

only once...an old TomTom sent me up a tiny road with a mahoosive hill and we got stuck....

Saw any Moose on the way up??

[miniyazz]

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.