GPS Disasters (Warning, Not Safe for Travel)

[catcul]

Mental Floss recently posted a story about drivers who followed their GPS into disaster.

Thankfully, the worst thing my GPS did to me was send me 18 miles in the wrong direction.

[PepperElf]

We were renting a car once and the GPS went insane and put us in another city for a few minutes. However, we were fine because we were only using GPS for general reference and already had the route planned.

the only time GPS sent us to the wrong place was when my BF's phone GPS kept reverting to another location we planned to go to later that day.

[Crossbow]

Worst mine ever did was to tell us to take an exit that didn't exist. Kind of hard to exit the highway from a bridge with no off-ramp...


Of course, MapQuest told us to do the same thing....

[bhskittykatt]

Mine once kept telling me to turn north when there was nowhere to turn. Turns out I had forgotten I'd set it to walking a few days prior and Hubs (the one operating it at the time) didn't notice. I have a feeling that at least a few of these may be due to something similar (set to walking/biking instead of driving).

I also threw a fit at my GPS last year when we missed our ferry and had to drive the long way down the peninsula. I didn't print out maps for that route and had never driven it before, and the GPS kept trying to direct me back to the ferry dock. Did eventually figure out how to set it to avoid ferry routes, but I was cursing at it for a while there.

[pollywog]

Does anyone else hear Mayham. "Turn left now!" "Recalculating".

[fireheart]

My boyfriends GPS once played up on us. Basically we were driving along the expressway (which changes direction at certain times) and the GPS still thought the road was closed.

So for the entire stretch of the expressway we were treated to a robotic female voice going "recalculating" every five seconds.

[PepperElf]

oh and one of the highways here *finally* made it onto google maps & GPS.... only about a year after they opened. so for a while it was a "local secret" so to speak.

[smileyeagle1021]

The worst my GPS has done is send me in a circle while I was in Vegas... oaky, so a square, but you get the idea (it sent me on 4 right turns in a grid and finally had me turn left at the intersection that it first told me to turn right on... and this wasn't a recalculating thing that I had gone the wrong way, that is the route it told me to take).
Google maps on the other hand has before told me my destination (a haunted hospital attraction) was in the middle of a alf alfa field.

[PepperElf]

but was it a HAUNTED alfalfa field?

[Chromatix]

Not GPS related, but my dad used to use a *really* out of date road atlas - probably from the late 1970s. He had added a number of motorways by hand which had been built in the meantime, and away from the motorway network it was still usually accurate, but occasionally we simply had to ignore it and drive according to road signs, then try to work out how to get back onto a road that *was* on the map.

At any rate, we were never tempted to commit blunders like those linked by the OP. There is something about a map, even if a passenger is giving directions from it, that inspires more common sense and situational awareness than a GPS mechanically barking instructions. If we had any use for a GPS, it would be to find our place on the map - and we generally managed without even that.

[Argabarga]

About the worst that's ever happened to me was the GPS told me to go down a road that didn't exist. Well, not as a "road", it was more like a "4 wheeler path through a field". But GPS was CONVINCED it was just as good a road as any other. Got to my destination anyway by going "round the block" and coming into the neighborhood from the opposite side.

When I got there, the guy I was meeting said "Did the GPS send you the wrong way?"

Apparently it's a problem he's familiar with for visitors. And it wasn't the GPS' fault really, I later consulted Google Earth and a few other resources, and they're all convinced it's a road too, so it's a database issue, not a satellite issue.

And to their credit, it sure LOOKS like a road from orbit.

I'm not distressed by the GPS having the occasional error as much as I am that people will, in spite of mounting evidence, never concede that something's wrong, they MUST obey the GPS!!!! And will keep going until they run out of road or their car is incapacitated by terrain or condition.

[wolfie]

I'm not distressed by the GPS having the occasional error as much as I am that people will, in spite of mounting evidence, never concede that something's wrong, they MUST obey the GPS!!!! And will keep going until they run out of road or their car is incapacitated by terrain or condition.

People like that have missed the most important lesson in "GPS 101" - recognizing when to avoid it. In the construction zone at the U.S. end of the Ambassador bridge, there are SIGNS POSTED saying that, for directions, follow posted signs rather than GPS.

[EricKei]

I'm one of those people who belongs on promo posters saying "PLEASE do not let this man attempt to go anywhere without a GPS!" ~_~ I have this bad habit of trusting my instincts if I do NOT have one on me. My record to date is being two hours off-course. AFTER asking for directions more than once.

That being said, if I'm going a long distance to somewhere I've never been, I use both maps AND a GPS (when I remember it...). I do still recall trying to find an out-of-the-way cabin rental place a few years back whose location was far enough into rural Louisiana (forested area rather than swampy) that no two map sites could agree on its location.

On the lighter side of things, there are certain sets of directions (iirc, "driving" directions from Japan to China is one of them) on GoogleMaps where one of the steps will be listed as "Jetski across the Pacific Ocean" -- it's Step 58 in the one I linked. Note that they're talking about the East China Sea at that point, but I suppose that's technically an extension of the Pacific ^_^

[dalesys]

... "PLEASE do not let this man attempt to go anywhere without a GPS!"...

Erik, you wouldn't be the gentleman I saw 40 years or so ago in Salt Lake on his way from Los Angeles to Gnarlins?

[EricKei]

If I were, there's a good chance that I would have wound up IN the waters of said lake. Yes, when I get going, I really am that bad. It is for this reason that, if I'm on a long trip with others and I am driving, whoever called "shotgun" gets roped into being my navigator. Oddly enough, I tend to be a really good navigator for OTHER people when I am asked to perform that role x.x

Kinda like proofreading (which is one of the major functions I have stepped up to do at the bro's paper...and which was almost not being done at all prior to that) -- The absolute worst person to proofread your own work, is YOU. You "know" what you meant to write, so that's what you tend to see. I take pride in being a downright vicious proofreader; it's part of what makes me good at it (I even helped a friend who Edits at a different paper to proof his agency's style guide).