My first phone had the newfangled GPS. She had a slight sigh every time she said “recalculating route”. I think her tiny brain exploded after a couple days with me.
All these stories we read about GPS-based navigators telling drivers to make Very Bad Mistakes (and drivers sometimes actually doing so)! What will happen when self-driving cars are navigating by these systems?
Nothing, because self-driving cars won’t be navigating by these systems, any more than humans are now. GPS and digital roadmaps will be part of self-driving systems, of course, but so will eyes watching the road. There will still be occasional accidents, of course, but not nearly as many as there are right now with human drivers (who very often don’t have eyes watching the road).
A few years ago in Dallas, there were two adjacent stores on North Central (that’s I-75 to y’all). I passed them every day on my way home from work for years … including right after my husband died, for extra morbid humor:
- Casket Store
… and next door: - Boxes R Us
Eeek! 
(Boxes R Us was a moving store.)
The box store is gone. There’s a pet groomer and a restaurant flanking the casket store.
And the casket store has 30 minute parking.
I had a TomTom. It was a Father’s Day gift, and the boys got me the Snoop Dogg and Darth Vader voice files.
I was very disappointed that the Vader one didn’t add “I find your lack of faith disturbing” when recalculating.
Snoop was fun - when routing you onto a toll road he’d ask “How much money you got?”.
I had a similar experience with Tom Tom while driving in Nova Scotia. It directed us off the main road and onto a dirt logging road. Unlike you, I followed it. We were in a 4WD with lots of gas and I figured the pavement would resume shortly. I figured wrong. 30 plus miles later averaging 15-20 mph and seeing not another person, we were back on the blacktop. I still like to have an actual road atlas in the car when driving long distances. I’ll check out the overall route before starting and keep it handy. Also, they often have actual signs indicating which way you should be going. Whoda thunk!
Like in Twister when Rabbit follows “Bob’s road” which suddenly connects back to a paved road? One of my favorite scenes.
Bolding added…
Are you sure I-75 runs through Dallas?
From Wikipedia:
Central Expressway is a north–south highway in Dallas, Texas (USA) and surrounding areas. The best-known section is the North Central Expressway, a name for a freeway section of U.S. Highway 75 between downtown Dallas and McKinney, Texas.
It’s state highway 75, not I-75. Easy enough mistake to make.
They started the numbers on the interstate system with the low numbers in the west (I-5) to avoid confusion with the US system’s low numbers in the east )US-1) just for that reason.
I guess in the middle there was some unavoidable overlap.
Would be strange to have both I-35 and I-75 running through the same city. DFW is a big sprawling mess of a metroplex, but not that big.
I-75 runs up thru Florida, Atlanta, GA, & Knoxville, eastern Tennessee.
Ditto me with Google Maps when driving from Crater of Diamonds (Arkansas) to Oklahoma City. It had us turn west on this road that was paved, but then it felt like we were on dirt, but we kept going as long as the road did. Eventually we found ourselves on OK-3 near Haworth, without ever having seen a “Welcome to Oklahoma” sign that we expected we’d see when we crossed the state border. I look at maps now and still have no idea exactly how we got from point A to point B.
Not far from our house, there’s a big sign that says, “This is God’s country. Don’t drive like Hell through it.”
So, no “Highway To Hell” allowed on the car stereo?
I used to pass by a church that had one of those signs that could be changed to a different message. One message that made me smile was posted during football season, and said, “Let’s meet at my house on Sunday, before the game. – God.”
This is too good to be for real: