I’ve had the same thing happen and it would have been dangerous had I not noticed since the ground level road I was driving on ended early due to construction but Google Maps thought I was on the highway above. Thankfully I saw the signs ahead of me and knew where to turn when I reached the end.
I’m not sure that’s a Google Maps thing - every system does that to me sometimes. Google maps , Waze, Apple ,my old Blackberry . I think it might have something to do with the road because sometimes these apps can tell I’m in the service road and sometimes not. Sometimes they can direct me out of a parking lot and sometimes not.
Google Maps related but I hate it when I try to look up nearby restaurants when I’m far away from my house and 25% of the time it gives me nearby restaurants by my house, like the phone doesn’t realize I’m away despite me using it for directions from said location 5 minutes ago.
Google Maps is on crack sometimes.
Pretty sure I’ve vented about this before but: a few years back, we were going to a hotel in Connecticut. The directions had us exit the highway, and head up the road toward the hotel… then continue on past the hotel entrance. Around a big loop, back onto the highway, 2 exits east, turn around, and go back… ad infinitum. I went past the hotel the first time thinking there was another entrance or something. The second time, I just ignored them.
There’s a highway exit near us where we go up a ramp to the local road, then turn left to head toward our neighborhood. Google Maps wants us to turn right, go to the next ramp off the local road, make a U-turn, and go back onto the local road, getting us back to the intersection where we should have gone left to begin with. I assume at that point it would give us valid directions to get home, but I haven’t tested this. My husband was once on a bus that was taking that route - and the driver was new to the area (any DC-area residents remember when they shut down about half of the Yellow / Blue lines one summer?) and followed the Google guidance. Whoopsie.
It’s not just Google Maps. We are staying at a condo in Florida at the moment and the car’s navigation system ALWAYS tells us to go straight on such-and-such road, rather than going right to get to a neighborhood entrance (it’s gated). Going straight takes us to a place that is ONLY an exit (we checked it out once). So we ignore it, and take the route we know actually works. We get within a block of the condo before the nav system finally gives up and quits telling us to make a U turn and take a route that would be 5 minutes longer.
That same nav system has gotten really confused a couple of times. Like the time it thought we were in the middle of a field near the road we were on. And the time we were driving though the town of Lake George, NY, and the map did indeed show us in the middle of Lake George… the lake. A friend suggested that this may have been an artifact of the time of day (early evening both times), and nearby mountains, and the GPS signals being somewhat blocked (only a factor in the car-needs-pontoons incident). . The same nav system has occasionally suggested we take a different route to avoid traffic; sometimes helpful, sometimes going 50 miles out of our way.
I think you’re correct on that. I’m pretty sure our cooktop had them in the front, but that’s a cooktop versus a range/oven unit. And the bit about not reaching because of the gas flames makes sense. Our gas range’s buttons had to be pushed in a bit to get them to the ON position, which I guess reduced the risk of kids playing with them - not that this stopped my daughter from trying to stick her finger into the flame once when she was about 3. I was right there, shrieked LOUDLY and grabbed her - seriously, I didn’t think I could ever move that fast - swung her over my arm and swatted her bottom with the other (we used spanking ONLY when there was genuinely dangerous behavior, like running into traffic, or, as noted, sticking one’s hand into an open flame!!). Pretty sure the shriek scared her more than anything - her hand wasn’t close enough to get burned, and the swat was not especially hard.
Oooh, another really boneheader design: A few years ago, I bought a high-capacity portable storage device. Plugged it into the computer containing the data I needed to copy. And it was not writeable.
I did some googling and it was shipped with a setting rendering it read-only. W. T. F.??? I wound up having to edit the computer’s registry to fix that. Needless to say, they got a 1-star review from me on Amazon.
Years ago, Mapquest made the assumption that if you were not on a limited access highway, you could turn onto any street that crossed it.
A street near me was on a bridge over railroad tracks with a street paralleling them and told you to turn onto the street below it, a fifty-foot drop.
On a road trip around Ireland in 2009, we brought a Garmin with a Ireland map chip. The map information was correct. The program it used to determine directions insisted on as close to a straight line from point A to point B as it could get. This was not noticeable the first day or two when we were going from Dublin to Newgrange to Belfast etc.
But from Londonderry to Sligo by way of Beleek, it ignored N- and A- level highways in favor of random rural roads not wide enough for two cars to pass. If it were scenic, it might have worked out OK. But it wasn’t and we spent that drive terrified. I manually plotted our routes using a map after that. The Garmin was only used for finding the next bed & breakfast after we got close.
The last time my parents came to visit they rented a car at the airport and drove themselves to my house (we can’t all fit in my Miata, so we needed a rental car anyway). And they brought their old Garmin GPS from around that same era to get directions to my house. It ignored the route that’s almost all freeways (which is the way Google Maps would route you), and routed them down a bunch of surface streets instead. Those old mapping algorithms had pretty much one goal, find the shortest distance from A to B, with no concept of the kinds of streets, how fast traffic moves on them, whether there are a bunch of traffic lights, etc.
Of course the early GPS systems still had no live traffic data, but everyone I’ve used from the start had at least a setting for finding the a) shortest route or b) fastest route. This also applied to the old online route planers. Maybe all who had this problem had the settings wrong.
Back when I had a Magellan, you could set it to avoid highways. Is it possible your parents did that- I know my mother would have.
And I just checked Waze- you can do it there too
It’s possible that “shortest route” was simply the default, and they either didn’t know how to change it, or just didn’t think to do so. In they small city where they live it’s likely that in most cases the shortest and fastest routes are pretty close, so just leaving that setting on probably works for them most of the time.
Heh, We were driving around Spain in 2009, using a borrowed Garmin with a Spain map chip. It worked fine…until we got to Madrid, when our highway essentially entered a long tunnel, and then it had no idea where we were. We had to drive completely through the tunnel, pull over, and look at our map to determine which exit to take. In retrospect, we should have printed out the route, but didn’t.
Sometimes out of curiosity I’ll set my phones GPS to avoid tolls. Wow, the time difference can be amazing. Makes me appreciate the toll roads.
I used those old Garmin handheld GPS units since about 1998. They were really good for what they were, but had so many limitations compared to what we have now. The only effective way to use them in an unknown area was with review of an adequate paper or electronic map ahead of time, and then preferably a paper map during the actual trip.
They were great at telling you where you were, but not always so good at saying where you wanted to go. The only time it was a good idea to follow their directions was if you already knew that was the right way to go. This is far from saying they’re useless. A paper map doesn’t tell you exactly how far to the exit, or give a reasonably accurate ETA.
Anyway, this might be better for the software spin-off of this thread, but the old Garmin Navigator or whatever they called their Windows mapping software, was terrible. Just bad interfaces all around. Slow and clunky to use. As if it had been written by somebody who’d never used a map before. It’s been too long for me to remember specific examples of suck.
When Google Maps first appeared in beta, it was so much dramatically better. Faster, easier to use, better routes, and more features for something that ran in a web browser! Just program each turn of the Google route into the Garmin as a waypoint, and the best of both worlds.
Ah, this reminds me of a mower I talked my dad into getting. It was a 21 inch push mower with an electric start. I cajoled him into it due to the difficulty I had as a short lad in starting the vertical pull rope start one we had. The thing started and ran OK if the battery was charged. Ironically, we rigged a simple rope start pulley onto the top of it for emergencies. It worked!
Anyway, to the bad part:
The underside of the mower was covered over about 50% of its area. It was made that way to reduce the likelihood of chopping off an errant foot, I suppose. Also, the discharge chute was extra long and also had its bottom covered, making it a duct. The extra deck metal also made the thing heavier than most mowers.
The damn thing clogged if the grass being cut was, well, being cut. Since I had to shut it off to unclog it, the battery would only last about four or five starts. When it wasn’t clogged, the discharge duct placed the cut grass in tight little rows that were really an eyesore. Eventually, Montgomery Wards (where dad got it and had a service contract on it) replaced the lower deck with a normal one. It worked a lot better then. By that time I had grown enough that rope starters didn’t bother me and I had acquired my own mower from a scrapyard and had about six yards a week I mowed for money.
Fifty years later I still feel kinda bad for my dad over that mower.
My husband and I were talking about this while in a rental car. I don’t want a fucking tv screen to change the fan level, the temperature level, the radio volume, the radio station. Give me a fucking knob that I can use without looking at it.
Re: GPS/routing. In many cases street type, speed limit data was not available back then.
This is a major peeve of mine. It’s the same story: drive with headlights on, for safety, on cloudy days. But there is often glare, so I have my sunglasses on. Can’t see the clock with the LEDs dimmed.
They might consider tying the dimming to, you know, ambient brightness, instead of whether I’ve turned the headlights on or off.
OTOH, most modern cars have daytime running lights on at all times, which don’t affect the dimming of the interior lights. Do these count, in areas where lights on/off are governed by laws (as a few posters have mentioned)?
Yeah me too. But more of a minor peeve. I drive with my headlights and sunglasses on a lot. When you live in the mountains at serious altitude that’s just the way it goes.
With switchbacks everywhere you want people to see you coming. And even on a cloudy day, or a day with light snow falling, it can be to bright.
No one goes anywhere (in daytime) without their sunglasses at altitude. It’s just not done.
My Honda GPS once somehow got set to “Never use freeways.” Uh, I’d never in a million years do that intentionally, and I didn’t figure it out until I was halfway to Rancho Palo Verdes from the Marina del Rey area. At that point, I’d have had to drive a long way out of my way to get to a freeway, but I probably should have.
I was going to the house of a lady who was going to do some oil painting restoration for me, and I was over an hour late getting there. I was mortified.