Recently, I have noticed my parents complain of making wrong turns more often. I was putting it down to age, poor concentration, etc until I took a drive with them. We were driving along the beltway and didn’t need to exit for about 3-5 miles. The navigation system had other ideas, however. She instructed my father to exit at the next exit, which he did despite my telling him that it was much too early to exit. She then told him to stay in the left-hand lane and reenter the beltway. In other words, we took an exit just to get back on within about 100 yards. I heard the lady and saw the screen and all I can say is that she is gratuitously messing with my parents’ minds.
Well, that’s hardly sporting when a GPS does that to older folks. :mad:
Turn it off. I never use GPS unless I’m on a trip and in a strange city.
I trust my brain and not a piece of silicon.
Is it a GPS that’s built into the car, or a stand alone unit?
My cell phone’s GPS navigator (Android, uses Google Maps) will occasionally pull shit like that. I’ve had it tell me to exit the highway (a change from its original directions which did NOT involve that exit - it changes its mind halfway through the trip sometimes)… go 1000 feet… and make a U-turn.
Mine tried to direct me to a Subway sandwhich shop…on a sandy dirt road which would have undoubtedly gotten me stuck if I had gone down it. Still possible there was one at the end of it if I had been brave tho!
GPS’s are like college professors. In general it’s a good idea to defer to the one with encycopedic knowledge, but it’s a better idea to know when to call bullshit and think for yourself. Unconditional obedience is a bad thing, especially when the one giving the orders isn’t sentient.
“Death by GPS” in desert
VoiceSkins.com
Yeah, I’d be worried.
is this an older system? what it told them to do might have been technically the “shortest distance” route, even if it didn’t make any sense. about 9-10 years ago, Mapquest did a similar thing to me.
If you can, check the settings and make sure they don’t have some weird “fuel efficient” or “no tolls” setting. My dad’s system was set to save gas, so it took him on the slowest path possible.
The other day I was using my stand alone GPS to drive to a place I’d never been in the local metropolitan area. I was on the highway headed in the right direction, when all of the sudden the GPS told me to take a left turn on some road running parallel to the highway. I didn’t. Driving another few seconds caused the GPS to recalculate and put me back on track to where I knew I should be going.
My best guess as to what happened, and what is probably happening with your parents’ GPS is that for some reason it has lost accuracy, because it can’t see enough satellites, so it’s “locked” onto the wrong road. Most GPS’s will decide that if your traveling near a road, then you must be on that road. This is to overcome the natural inaccuracy that is part of using a gps. So, if the gps is being particularly inaccurate it may decide you are traveling down the wrong road, and give you inaccurate instructions.
Another problem that can happen is that it can get caught processing. The GPS gives an instruction and then is waiting for that instruction to complete, or it takes too long to load up the next instruction, etc., and it misses giving it, so now you’re off course. The in-law’s in car GPS is nice, in that it will say “right turn immediately followed by left turn” ahead of time. My hand held unit, a Garmin Vista Cx, would tell me to turn right, but then may or may not get the left turn announced in time, if I’m going fast.
Of course, there is also the problem of incorrect/outdated map data. That road used to go through; there’s a better route on the new highway; the business moved; the address is N 112th Street, not 112th Street; etc. There can also be the problem of poor prioritizing in the GPS. The dirt road would have taken you to a Subway on some other paved roads, but the dirt road is not the best route to get there, just the shortest, or the GPS doesn’t know it’s a dirt road.
Anyway, my advice would be to make sure the GPS can get a strong signal. Does the antenna on a built in GPS ever need adjustment or troubleshooting? Perhaps the lead can become disconnected. If there’s a problem with that, it would effect accuracy. If it’s a standalone unit, perhaps it should be repositioned. Is there a new map set available? I know sometimes those can be very expensive, but occasionally are free or reasonably priced, depending on the particulars.
It’s an integrated system and usually good at telling you ahead of time ie right turn in 1/4 mile followed by left turn. Anyway, I just figured that the GPS lady had a mean streak.
Had Google Maps tell me to do the same thing. I ignored it, as I knew getting back on the freeway would make me miss the street I needed to get to. Weird…
I always found that “shortest distance” would do stuff like that where “fastest trip” would keep me on the highways.
When I missed my turn recently, my Android running Google Latitude sent me on a 15km detour to accomplish what I could have done with a u-turn. I figured it was punishing me for not following instructions in the first place.
I remember way back when I was starting out in my career (this would be 1997 or so) I had to go to our customer’s facility to pick up a car which we were going to use for a product demo. When I got in, I saw that it had an add-in navigation system so I thought I’d give it a try. As I was driving along I had to detour because of construction, and when it picked up on that and started recalculating, the voice said “you have left the route.”
And it sounded pissed!
I think that little bit was removed before they put it on sale.
My GPS is a hand-me-down that my mom never bought updated maps for. It doesn’t know about the southern extension on Illinois I-355, and it’s fun to freak it out until it picks up I-80. It thinks I’m driving in a cornfield, I guess.
I also get occasional issues when I drive on overlapping highways, there’s some sort of clover-loop thing I drive through when I’m getting onto I-294 S. She thinks I keep changing roads because she doesn’t measure my Z-coordinate, and my facing changes on on-/off-ramps. Do any GPS have a Z-coordinate? I suppose not.
Back before stand-along GPS became common, we had a GPS addon for our laptop.
That thing would try to send us up every single exit ramp, and then right back on the freeway.
Our best bet was that someone had made a programming glitch. Somehow the ramps were being used not just to get to the crossroads, but to get to the freeway we were already on.
Mine must have a Z coordinate. Once I was walking on a bike trail under a road and wanted to see what road. I consulted my phone GPS and it told me that it couldn’t do anything because I was not on a road. I was directly under the road about 20 feet.
They do measure the Z, and most GPS’s will display an approximate altitude or elevation, although it’s not dead on accurate. I almost wonder if there’s a barometer in my Garmin…it shows the elevation of my driveway differently every time I check it. It’s good for checking to see if you’re going uphill or downhill on a gentle slope.