Brits have more faith in GPS than their own eyes…
Newswheel staff :: 21 April 2006 :: Filed under Safety
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Seeing is believing – but only on a small screen
Dangerous driving under the influence used to mean boozed-up punters parking their cars in the scenery at high speed. But this is the year 2006, so drink driving is out (ish) and GPS-guided idiocy is in. Reports of dozy drivers blindly following the directions spewed out by their sat-nav systems are on the up. The latest comes from a town in Wiltshire which is currently fishing two cars a day out of a river as drivers blithely ignore the torrent in front of them in favour of following the soothing instructions from their dashboards…
Do cars float? Apparently some drivers aren’t sure…
This most recent episode kicked off thanks to a road closure near Luckington in Wiltshire. That caused sat-nav systems to throw up an alternate route which included a ford crossing. The water depth of said road-traversing ford is typically below two feet, but can rise to double that after heavy rain. And four feet of water sailing past the front bumper is apparently small beer to modern Joe and his sat-nav device. As Lesley Bennett, a Luckington parish councillor who lives by the ford, explained to the Times newspaper: “When the car conks out the driver looks stunned. When you ask what happened, they say, ‘My sat-nav told me it was this way’.” Predictably, residents of Luckington have allegedly been cashing in on the stupidity of GPS-toting drivers by further soaking them for £25 a pop to haul their motors out of the river.
Earlier this month, fleets of cars, minibuses and trucks were reported to have been mistakenly guided along a narrow track that skirts a 100ft cliff near the village of Crackpot in North Yorkshire (you really couldn’t make this stuff up). Apparently, the usual drill is for vehicles to first blissfully ignore the total disappearance of the Tarmac road surface. The next step is to become stuck on the crumbling, rocky lane. Which in turn is followed by attempts to reverse back from whence they came. And that unwittingly brings the drivers perilously close to the aforementioned 100ft drop off. Repeat ad infinitum. In the mean time, the local council is considering the revolutionary step of erecting warning signs, while Trafficmaster, one of the UK’s leading vendors of sat-nav kit, has admitted the route was recommended by its database but claimed it has now removed any possibility of the road being selected as a through-route.
It’s all fun and games, for now. But brace yourself for the anti-techno backlash when pea-brained drivers begin to navigate themselves into an early grave. Questions in the House of Commons, letters from “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells” and earnest TV presenters exposing the latest sat-nav-orchestrated ethnic cleansing epsiode. That sort of thing…
Linkage:
BBC (Crackpot story)
TimesOnline (Luckington story)
Posted 18 January 2007, by Vorris
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