The GPS Made Me Do It
If someone told you to drive into the lake, would you do it?
About 10 years ago I started to tweet news stories about people who had followed their GPS navigation application and drove into canals, into lakes and other places that weren’t designed for vehicular traffic. I came up with the hashtag #TheGPSMadeMeDoIt and if you follow the link, you will find many of my tweets on the topic. Some are funny, some are not.
It was a little understandable back when many people didn’t yet have in-car navigation systems like Navman and TomTom, and Google Maps was just finding its way.
I suspect this is one of those moments when your parents take their car keys off you. But perhaps it is them making these mistakes! Surely if you are driving and you see through the windscreen that the road goes into a lake, you would stop! But no, it seems people are still doing this.
The latest story comes from Scotland, where it appears several people have stranded their cars trying to follow Google Maps instructions down a set of stairs in Edinborough. It has become so serious that the council is looking at putting in bollards to stop cars from going down the steps.
Now in fairness, these steps have only been there for about 12 months, so it isn’t unreasonable for the navigation app to not know about them, and as you can see in the image above, there is even a sign naming the ‘lane’.
So just a thought for you, so that your parents, or perhaps your insurance company take your keys off you. If it looks like a lake, it probably is a lake and if your car is not amphibious, you probably want to trust your eyes looking outside of the car, rather than at your phone.
If you don’t, you might become the topic of my next story.
Reminds me of the trip to Pawarenga and I nearly drove straight into the sea - I could see a reflection and it looked like the road was shimmering, but up ahead there was a marae! I opened the door and indeed, it was the tide under the wheels. In the morning I saw that the marae is inaccessible at high tide, which is why I was told to arrive before dark!! Can’t rely on Google for tides info and disappearing roads in this changing climate !!
I always feel quite confused reading about situations like these, and can't process how the heck people can be so blindly trusting about technology 🤔 Recently read about a person who drove into a wall of a nursery building, because GPS showed her it's possible...
P.S. First thing that came to my mind when reading was this epic scene from the Office series https://youtu.be/DOW_kPzY_JY?si=UgfYs2ohJXu3v9vZ