Ten Ways To Know Your GPS Is Trying To Kill You

73 thoughts on “Ten Ways To Know Your GPS Is Trying To Kill You”

1. Did you buy your GPS unit by clicking through a link at The Onion? I wouldn’t put it past those guys to make and sell an ironic geo-locator.

2. My friends bought me a bumper sticker.

   “Don’t follow me. I’m following my GPS”

   I can’t tell you, Sarah, the number of times my GPS has given me strange directions, including a weird penchant for traveling gravel roads whenever possible…

3. We have experienced most of these same “features/issues” with our Garmin Nuvi 1390T, so I suspect you also have a Garmin. I think we have even encountered the same issue in Astoria OR. Most of the new roundabouts going in are not included in our lifetime map updates. Maybe they don’t think our lifetime will be long using the GPS?

   1. YES — Garmin!

      1. Seriously, though, are the other brands better?

         1. Ours has never done any of those things, either the Tom Tom or the Nokia Drive; the only time we’ve ever had problems was when we specifically went a different route for our own reasons, then we get told to ‘turn around when possible’ a lot. It was slightly more problematic in the states, but still nothing as severe as your speaking of here.

4. G.P.S.
   Gory
   Pulverisation
   System.

5. Try using one in Germany or Austria. In Vienna, we eventually gave up, parked the car and WALKED the four blocks to our hotel. When we asked the clerk how to get the car to the hotel (showing her its location on a map), she (a native Viennese) said: “I know where your car IS; I just don’t know how you got it there.”

   By the way,a totally gratuitous plug for the Royal Hotel (Singerstrasse) in Vienna. Inside the Ring, a block or so from Stephansdom, on the Grabe/Kartnerstrasse corner, inexpensive, fantastic service and decent rooms. Coffee bars all around, you can walk the entire Ring in three days using the Royal as your base. Machen Sie eine Notiz, bitte.

   Just don’t try to drive there with SatNav.

   1. Portugal is quite fun too, since a lot of the roads exist in INTENT. “Eventually, we’ll have a road here” type of intent. But they’re already on the maps.

      1. I have ran into that surveying in small towns, that somebody thought were going to grow when they laid them out. You would get this plat map and the boss would say, “this ought to be a real easy job, the property is at the corner of Sixth and Walnut, three corners will be on the road and you’ll only have to go back into the one.” When you get there and drive around looking for Sixth you realize that the streets stopped at Fourth, and there is no Walnut anywhere, the property is two blocks into that big briar patch over there.

         1. One of the big problems we had in Germany (in most of Europe, I should say) is that some of the streets would change names at each intersection. There were the times, too, where the locals called a street one thing, and the street signs called it something else. Getting directions, with my poor German, was sometimes more confusing than the maps.

            1. I hate that, and I have seen places where the street signs are a different street name than the street addresses.

               Where I grew up two of the three ways to get to the road I lived on had road signs that called the road one name, but the locals called it by a different name, one of which there actually was a road by the name the locals called it, but it went in the opposite direction. My mother explained this to me by saying, “Oh, they changed those road names when I was it high school, but nobody pays any attention to the signs.” Well…. unless your trying to give a nonlocal directions.

      2. Portugal is quite fun too, since a lot of the roads exist in INTENT. “Eventually, we’ll have a road here” type of intent. But they’re already on the maps.
         Although when we left Porto heading for Bilbao a few years back we found ourselves on a new motoway that was not marked on any map and not in the GPS. And after cruising this non-existant road for a while it suddenly and abruptly ended dumping us on some really really minor wiggly road…

   2. I second the recommendation for the Royal Hotel.

   3. Well, it’s your own fault for trying to drive in Vienna. I don’t. 😉

      I could give you STORIES about me trying to find my way in the wilds of East Anglia though, with the GPS telling me to take the 2nd exit a the roundabout and there was no roundabout anywhere near where I was…
      Singerstrasse. Nice address. 🙂 Easy to reach by underground, exit St Stephen’s Square.

      1. I lived in extreme eastern Northamptonshire (the border with Cambridgeshire was literally 100 FEET from our house), so I know what you’re saying. We lived there long before GPS. My wife learned to make lace there, and we’d drive to Lace Days all over the area. Sometimes it took three tries just to get to the right town. The British have EXCELLENT maps, but they only update them about every ten years. A lot can happen in ten years, even in England.

6. I have a Tom Tom GPS and the “fun” part is when the “street number” that the GPS is using for directions doesn’t exactly match the actual location. IE I can see where I want to be but the GPS tries to send me elsewhere. Oh, it (as well as Mapquest) thinks our house is a block away from its actual location. [Smile]

   1. Google generally puts my house about a half mile up the road from where it is, but where I live, I figure that’s not too bad. At least it knows my road is here (even though for several years I didn’t think it did, until I found out it was misspelled in Google Maps).

7. ummm – we take maps and a computer so we foil our GPS. 😉

8. When GPS was newly-affordable, I outfitted my boat with one so I could go lobstering in the fog. At any rate, after a few weeks I was pretty proficient, so in an incredible pea souper of a fog, the kind only New England produces, I went out with great confidence of the sort given to drunks and teens, to work my close-to-shore gear. The GPS said I was in the middle of a field, so I yelled to the farmer for directions, including the fact that my GPS said I was on his land. He yelled back to mind his cows if I was going to be lobstering in his hay field.

9. “5 – Trying to get you to drive off the road. This only happened in Astoria, Oregon, but it would tell us to turn onto a road… that was 100 feet below ours. We have no explanation for this, and we chose not to drop on someone’s house. (Odd of us.)”

   There’s one of these errors in my TomTom in Johnstown PA; except we’d end up on top of a hospital if we somehow managed to dodge all the trees on the embankment. Supposedly the companies that create the maps insert a few of these errors deliberately to catch anyone stealing their data.

   “4 – Takes you a different route every time. ”

   I wonder when my Dad started working for the GPS companies? Seriously, my parents were married for almost 20 years before my Mom learned how to drive to her inlaws house because my Dad kept taking different routes every time. I only learned the route because of numerous trips taken with my Grandpa driving.

   1. My impression is that the deliberately inserted errors are usually ones that depict a route as less accessible, rather than more, to avoid lawsuits. So a street that goes through in reality will be changed to a cul-de-sac on the map; that sort of thing. Creating errors in the other direction could be dangerous if someone’s trying to get their injured kid to a hospital in a great hurry and it turns out that there’s a cliff or a brick wall where the map depicts a clear path.

10. We have a Garmin as well, and that “make a U-turn” happens just about every time navigate with it somewhere. Plus your trip through the forest in South Carolina is much the same as when we were in Oklahoma and it told us to take a dirt road through a field. I’m pretty sure we weere trespassing on someone’s farm, but it did eventually take us to the paved road that we should have turned on about half a mile later. Fun times. And don’t get me started on the “recalculating” stuff. I really want to reprogram it to say “resistance is fultile, you will be navigated.”

11. I don’t have a GPS anymore. I have an iPhone, and it has been far more reliable than any GPS that I’ve ever used.

    Which doesn’t mean it doesn’t have some quirks. It does, but after three years I’m used to them, and for me it works.

    Wayne

    1. FYI, my wife has a new Android phone. We haven’t tried to use it for navigation. Yet. Have to remember to do that sometime.

       Of course where we live now (Town of Cobalt, population 1500) it’s pretty hard to get lost.

       Wayne

       1. Android navigation is fairly good and it also has “Speak Destination” which can be fun and frustrating. I remember demonstrating it by trying to go to “Frank and Al’s Pizza” in Port St. Lucie FL and it tried to navigate to Al Franken’s Senate Office in Washington DC. But mostly we use the Garmin since you can change the voice, the screen is larger and we travel a lot in areas with no cell phone reception. Twice a cousin has been messed up with his iPhone because of the lack of cell phone reception trying to meet up with us.

       2. My wife and I both have Droid X’s and the navigation app has only been wrong once. Other than that, it’s been pretty handy. We’ve got our accounts linked so that each of us can simply open up the map to Big Brother the other…helpful when planning out dinner serving time, etc.

       3. I use the Google Maps app on my Android phone to navigate, but I don’t listen to its GPS-like turn-by-turn directions. Instead, I plan out the route ahead of time and memorize the major turning points: “head west on 141, take the Market Rd. exit and left onto Market Rd., then look for the light at Parr Ave., because half a mile after that is your right turn onto Frenlow Drive.” Since I know extremely well how to get onto highway 141, that means I just have to memorize Market left, Parr, Frenlow right. And I use a mnemonic to do that: a left-handed golfer is playing through a crowded market, trying to make par. “Friend,” he calls to a nearby stall owner, “I think my ball ended up low under your stall. Could you check?” The man bends down and yells, “You’re right!”

          And voila — I have my set of directions memorized, along with warnings so I can prepare for the turn ahead of time. The signs on 141 will tell me when the Market Rd. exit is coming up, and seeing Parr Ave. (which I can tell from the map is a major street and will have a traffic light) warns me to get in the right-hand lane and start looking at the street signs for those little residential streets, so I can stop Frenlow. And if I miss a turn somewhere, I can always pull over into a parking lot while I turn my attention to my phone and tap the necessary buttons to make it recalculate the route. Or I might not even need the route recalculation, as long as my phone’s GPS can pinpoint my location on the map.

          As for being out of cell phone coverage, that’s where I love Android: the Google Maps app on Android has a feature where you can pre-cache the map data for a square area ten miles on a side (totalling one hundred square miles), and that part of the map will still be fully detailed even if your phone can’t find an Internet connection. (You pre-cache, of course, when you’re at a good Wifi connection). So as long as I remember to pre-cache the area around my destination, I’ll be fine. Of course, I’m still vulnerable to batteries running out… but I have a car charger for that problem. And if the car battery is dead, then not having a map isn’t the only reason I can’t reach my destination. 🙂

12. Every time I read “recalculating” in that, I heard it in the voice of the guy who refers to himself as “mayhem” in the Allstate insurance commercials.

13. It appears I only go places I don’t know how to get to on days when GPS isn’t working properly. I was driving with my niece one day and not one of our three phones would stay connected to and maintain a route. We were just outside 495 in Ma, and one of the phones thought we were approaching Montreal.

14. The GPS we use apparently doesn’t have one way roads programmed into it, so tries to get you to turn head on into on coming traffic.

15. I’m very good at map reading, and don’t have a GPS. My daughter brought hers over when we started looking for a new house. Trusting it OR Mapquest will definitely get you killed, especially in Colorado. My only problem is out-of-date maps. Google Maps is pretty reliable, but even they have some really weird quirks.

    1. When I said the GPS allows me to get around — maps don’t mean diddly to me. When I say I’m REALLY REALLY DUMB (handicapped levels of dumb) at some visual reasoning (only the more abstract, weirdly) that’s one of the areas hit by it.

       1. I can read a map – except I have one disability – I am always 180 degrees off. lol

          1. Oh. There really IS something wrong with my visual processing, btw. I can draw from life, but ALL my portraits end up tilted. Drove my teachers nuts. Tilted about fifteen degrees left. We don’t know why. I see that they’re tilted, it’s just while I’m drawing I don’t. Something in the brain is askew. (Besides the obvious.)

             1. Ever try tilting your easel? That way when the portriat is done and hung on the wall it will be straight 😉

                1. LOL.

          2. Something wrong with my spacial 😉

          3. Flip it over! (runs).

       2. Notwithstanding what I wrote, sometimes maps lie too. We were on vacation in Germany, and wanted to drive from Chiemsee, where the US had a guest house, to Garmisch-Parterkirchen. I found a road that would take us from the Autobahn to Innsbruck to Garmisch. It said it was a class-two paved road. When we got to the road, we found out it was actually a class-four TOLL road. It was paved, but 80% of it was one lane. If you met someone, you had to pull over and let them pass. There were a number of paved pull-over places along the road. While driving it was a bit nerve-wracking, it was one of the most spectacular drives I’ve ever made in Europe. In fact, many of the most memorable places we’ve seen were found quite by accident. Sometimes getting lost can be a blessing.

          1. No, no, the term is “geographically challenged” or perhaps “geographically embarrassed.” Not lost. Or if you are using a map and misread your bearing off the compass (not that I have ever done that, mind), you might become “topographically confused.” But never lost. 😉

             1. oh well map challenged

16. GPS – teaching drivers to spend 30 minutes on a five minute drive since the 90s.

17. Ya’ll ain’t lived until you drive by ‘following the arrow’ of a DeLorme Laptop Program with GPS.

    One of the ‘funnest” parts is that with a seventeen inch screen it always show the indicator on the leading edge of the screen. That way I have much, much (like zero) notification when the road forks, narrows, or turns.

    DeLorme software enginners are on my “list”.

18. I’ve had one do the “recalculating” or “RAIM Failure” shortly after takeoff in clouds. That is why you always have a backup, be it digital maps or hard copies, in the cockpit. Works for cars too.

    The rent car in Pueblo had one once, an early talking Apollo IIRC. My flight nurse dinked around with it on our drive back to the airport and it told us to take a bunch of side roads. I opted for the usual highway route and the little box refused to recalculate. Instead it kept trying to order us back to the hospital and then onto its route!

19. One possibility for GPS confusion: they have to be using SOME map, and mapmakers place one or two “harmless” false blocks or roads to catch and sue other mapmakers who might just copy them instead of doing original work. I actually found one in Charlotte NC, the otherwise best map had Plaza extending one extra block South beyond where it actually ended.
    I’ve seen documentaries on the huge GPS problems in Britain: apparently many lorry drivers in Britain are recent East European immigrants, and they always follow the GPS, no matter how absurd the instructions. You’ll see News of the Weird photos of giant 18 wheelers trying to plow their way between two Medieval buildings eleven feet apart, or trying to blaze a trail through the forest, because the GPS said keep going.

    1. If the directions say X, then “just following orders” will keep them out of trouble, including with the laws of physics? O.o

20. For the Orienteering merit badge in Boy Scouts (I belonged for a couple of years in the tail end of the era when the Scouts lived up to Heinlein’s image of them) I had to draw a map of a piece of ground a couple of miles across. Go from this point to that point at 274 thekeyboarddoesn’thaveadegreemark, draw a line the distance I estimated by the number of steps and my average stride, draw in a rough image of the actual path, go to the next point. It helped me to understand and follow printed maps.
    I grew up 25 or so miles West of the unexplained roughly three mile dip South in the North Carolina South Carolina border. The West side of the dip is drawn to match a creek, the East side is a straight line. Legend has it the mapmakers got drunk and slept it off in the unsecured wagons while the horses wandered down the wrong road. Hung over the next morning, the mapmakers estimated where they woke up, drew a straight line back to where they got drunk, followed a creek back up to the agreed-upon border and resumed work.

    1. I recall doing that back in boyscouts, and then later doing similar when looking for original evidence of corners set by GLO a hundred years ago.

21. I find it absurd that at the same time they are outlawing texting and talking on the phone while driving, they are installing GPS’s with built in map screens in the dash of new cars. I surveyed for years, and got very good at reading maps, so I generally use a paper map and not a GPS (the batteries never die in a paper map either). I do have a GPS that connects to GPS collars on my dogs, and really like, but I don’t trust it and still run the old fashioned radio collars, because either the GPS will screw up, or the satellites will have a problem, the question is when not if. And it always happens at the one time when they are actually lost, you never have a problem when you don’t really need it.

    The other thing I hate about the handheld GPS’s is that their screen is so small, if I zoom it in enough to see details, there is so little area on the screen that you can’t see where you need to go.

    Outside of the city I have a very good sense of direction and never get lost, drop me in the middle of a city, however :(. But I would hate to drive around busy city streets while trying to look at a little GPS screen, so I just drive around in circles until I find where I want to go 😉

22. Oh, good Lord. They did a worse job than I thought: http://www.npr.org/2012/02/19/147115872/north-vs-south-carolinas-seek-to-redraw-border

23. Too funny!! We just moved to Brussels, Belgium and are using a borrowed Garmin, and it has been trying to kill us since day one!! Telling us to drive the wrong way on one way streets, taking us down farm tractor access roads, and the worst making us get off the Autobahn only to make us get right back on it!! It too recalculates for no reason, and loves U-turns!! I have a Tom Tom on the way, I never had trouble with it in the states, so hopefully it will work better than the Garmin.

24. I had my Garmin Nuvi try to take me out to Dog Island, about 2-3 miles offshore, when I was looking for restaurant. There is no ferry to and no restaurant on Dog Island…

25. We were coming home from NecoCon two years ago and driving through the Hampton Road bridge-tunnel when The Daughter informed me that according to the GPS on her smart phone we were two miles to the east somewhere out in the Chesapeake Bay … which fortunately we were not.

    A friend once told me that early models created a black hole around the Pentagon…which was lovely (sarcasm) if you were coming into Washington from the south on I-95.

    1. The early model (mid 1990s) aviation GPS would turn themselves off when you flew near/under/through military airspace, even when that airspace was not active. Now they just flash a little reminder at you.

26. Has anybody tried tracking the manufacturing chain to determine whether GPS devices are produced by Pierson’s Puppeteers, as a cunning device to purify the gene pool of those who will blindly follow instructions?

    1. Seems a bit hamhanded for the Puppeteers, though.

27. Since I tend to have a very good sense of direction and my Dad taught me to use sight line techniques to figure out where I am, I don’t often get lost. The other thing that helps, is that I am addicted to maps. PAPER maps, the kind you can spread out on a table and read for ages! Atlases come in there too, I simply enjoy knowing about the world around me. Having said that, I LOATHE GPS systems. I gave mine away to my granddaughter who is hopelessly directionally challenged.

    As I read maps all the time, I always have an atlas handy in the car when we are going anywhere. If I know I am going somewhere that is new, I pour over the map to make sure I know where I am going – especially in a strange city. If I want written directions, I pull them off the computer. Because I am NOT going to have some snarky voice telling me where to go, literally, while I am driving in the rain, in a strange city. Even with the voice turned off, it is annoying. So my GPS isn’t trying to kill me, I got rid of it before it had the chance.

28. As others have said, I find Google maps on the Android to work very well. I’ve used that combo successfully in the UK, France, USA and Japan. These days they even have traffic speed indicators in some places and those have turned out to be about as good as the dedicated sigalert maps in my experience. They certainly worked great for guiding my boss & I around the jammed freeways of LA last month.

29. I would have no problem being asked to go to Oklahoma to get to Hobby Lobby.

    What you describe only requires good spatial judgement and solid focus and attention to avoid a horrible death. (I admit to not being the best at these either.)

    My receiver is off-brand and they screwed up in fitting the specification. The GPS specification comes from military work, and my receiver, for some reason, is hooked into some sort of AI program that has run amuk.

    I regularly have murderous robots spent back from the future to pay me a visit. Fortunately, they are good people, and mostly good sports about it. One of them does like to tease me over all of the good stories coming out shortly from Hoyt, Kratman and Spoor that I am missing.
    Grins, Ducks, and Runs Away

    Got to mess around with the TV reception and see if I can get the convention on.

    1. It hasn’t started yet, has it?

       Eh. Dan and I use “time travelers” as explanation for all the unexplainables. We figure they’re here for the kids, they just affect us incidentally. We don’t know what the kids will be, but it will be massive. Good or bad, though, is up in the air.

       Heck Doctor Roberto Garcia Almeida Hoyt might very well perform the first brain transplant where the person survives 😉 — and some of you will get the joke!

       1. I’d checked the schedule the other day, and it said PBS would have coverage today. When I checked later today, it looked liked antiques roadshow or such, and the schedule no longer said convention. The TV itself still said convention, before it dissolved into static. (Or whatever it is called these days. I presume the the sales pitch for the HDTV standard had some sort of fancy term.)

          So me being a fool, hardly unusual. But I did figure out how to get the thing to see more channels I have little interest in, between content and irregular signal strength.

          I’d guess it is a reference to the RAH story about the brain transplant. (One of my early Heinlein related experiences was a set of critical essays which included a section on that story. I think I may have come across a Red Mars cartoon, and maybe the Starship Troopers ‘Roughnecks’ CGI before that, but I think I went on my first binge on the juveniles after that book.)

          I find time travel works poorly as an explanation for me. ‘How is it supposed to work? My head hurts!’ ‘Time travelers.’ ‘Arrgh… Owww! Please stop, have mercy, why, why, why?’ ‘Time Travelers.’

          I think my usual practice for the unexplainables is some combination of constantly poking at them and entirely ignoring them.

          1. I think there could be a lot of fun to be had with modern liberals attempting to correct the wrongs of the past. First thing, they would find few savages meet their definition of “noble.” Next, they would find that all of their attempts to prevent History’s “wrongs” invariably led to worse results. For example, stopping the Atlantic slave trade might produce mass extermination events as African tribes lost all incentive to keep alive captives taken in war.

             1. Or traveling back tens of thousands of years to acquire the secrets of Living Peacefully In Harmony With Nature, and ending up just getting brutalized. Dunno where to go with from there and still get something I’d like to read.

                1. Dunno where to go with from there and still get something I’d like to read.

                   Pamela Lisketter

                   Look her up on SM Stirling’s wiki. She’s exactly what you’re talking about and ends up exactly as you would think she and her granola-gnawing cohorts would. Even better is the fact the bad guy uses them (useful idiots, anyone?) to distract our heroes attention so the bad guys can get away without pursuit.

                   1. I was just thinking about her. [Evil Grin]

                      1. Personally, I think Marion Alston being a gay, black, Coast Guard officer is a direct apology from Stirling to the feminists for Yolande Ingolfsson.

                2. There is always a great depth of humour to be mined from indomitable stupidity, the only real problem is finding a way to keep them alive long enough for the novel. The best available example of this humour lode might be J. M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton, a parable on the British class structure, but American humour has long explored the triumph of The Common Man over The Experts, nowhere so enjoyably as the trial sequence in Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes To Town.

          2. Yeah, Roberto Garcia was the doc who did it in Fear No Evil.

          3. By now you probably know that the Convention convened on Monday, and then called it a day in interest of safety, because of Isaac (Called when a Tropical Storm which had posibility of hiting Tampa, now Hurricane looking to hit New Orleans this evening.)

       2. OK, considering where I left off reading this morning (yeah I know it is afternoon, but things are getting very interesting) I am NOT laughting.

30. GPS war stories are great fun, and I have a few of me own… like the time that the GPS said the cross-street I wanted was a quarter mile this way so turn right, but actually it was a quarter mile that way and I should have turned left.

    On a more serious note (is that allowed here?), though, there are two things everybody needs to remember about GPS’s. Thing 1 is that the GPS is only as good as its current position fix, and the position fix ain’t worth a damn if something is blocking the satellite signals. (ie, do not trust the GPS if you are in a tunnel, under an overpass, etc. Thing 2 is that the GPS is only as good as its map data is. All US-based GPS’s (that I’ve ever tried) seem to use the same original map database, and that database has a consistent ground-level error where street addresses are concerned. The street address is NEVER exactly where the GPS says it is. It ain’t you, and it ain’t the GPS, and it ain’t the manufacturer’s fault. It’s the fault of whatever contractor-company originally built the maps database.

    1. We used to be in GPS silence where I live. Someone or something deliberately (?) blocked signals for a three mile square radius. It no longer applies.

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