I hate to tell you this, but “Satnavs” in your vehicle are not foolproof, even though most of us assume that they are completely accurate. The picture above shows what happened when an Amazon delivery driver followed his satnav without paying too much attention to where it was taking him – he must have been paying some attention since he was driving, but obviously not much. Didn’t he see “JUST SEA” in front of him?
He followed his satnav down a very narrow pathway straight onto a very muddy beach on the Essex Coast of Eastern England. The coastguard was called and a local farmer eventually extracted the stranded van from the mudflat. The six mile-long (9.7km) public right of way – the narrow pathway – used to be the only route on to Foulness Island, on the Essex coast near Southend-on-Sea, before a bridge was built in 1922. I believe this pre-dates Satnavs by just a few years! So the blame must go to the Satnav programmer, as well as the dumb driver.
However, before we chastise the driver too much, it has to be said that he certainly isn’t the first person to fall foul of faithfully following a satnav – but why do we sometimes ignore what’s going on around us in the pursuit of a robotic voice announcing “You have arrived at your destination”?
Changes to road layouts around Greenside Lane in Edinburgh led to vehicles regularly trying to drive down a set of steps. Again, couldn’t the drivers see A SET OF STEPS IN FRONT OF THEM? In 2024, Edinburgh city officials had to find a solution to drivers being repeatedly sent down a set of steps by their satnavs. I assume they mean different people and not the same one continually trying to navigate the steps! There had been changes to the road layout the year before.
A barricade was eventually installed at the top of Greenside Lane, near the city’s Theatre Royal, and the council asked Google and Apple to update their systems. I wonder how many people tried to remove the barricade so they could religiously follow their satnavs’ instruction to drive down the steps?
In 2023, a Nissan Juke was left jammed in a narrow footpath in Tenby, Pembrokeshire, for a week. A protected Victorian heritage wall perched on the cliff was a complicating factor in getting the car out of the narrow path. The mechanic who helped remove it said the two American tourists blamed their satnav for sending them down the tiny path to St Catherine’s Island, which is at the foot of the nearby beach. They eventually abandoned the car to catch a train to their hotel.
Similarly in 2011, in Somerset, a lorry driver blamed his satnav for sending him down a 7ft (2m) wide alley off Bruton High Street, where he badly damaged a 300-year-old house.
Two women died on a slip road at the A5 near Milton Keynes when one followed audio instructions from her satnav to go down it THE WRONG WAY!! The coroner in Buckinghamshire asked tech companies like Google, Apple and TomTom to make changes to their audio prompts after this incident. Tracey Haybittle, 58, and Amal Mohamed Ahmed, 38, both died in the head-on collision. The coroner noted police attending the crash saw three other vehicles “perform exactly the same manoeuvre as Ahmed, and attempted to travel down the slip road in the wrong direction”. National Highways put up no-entry signs, and the tech firms all said they’d made improvements to clear up potential confusion. I would describe it in slightly more forceful terms than “confusion”.
In Essex, in 2019, police said a driver caught going the wrong way round the M25 motorway had blamed his satnav. Mind you, that was in Essex!!! – an inside, English joke!
There are regularly stories of drivers who end up going through floods, fords and teetering on the edge of canals, and many other dangerous situations, after slavishly following their GPS systems.
Research into what following satnavs does to our brains found that parts of the brain closes off temporarily when we hand over navigational control to GPS. Professor Hugo Spiers, from the Faculty of Brain Sciences at University College London, conducted research into what our brains do when we drive using GPS to navigate. The 2017 study involved 24 volunteers navigating a simulation of the streets of Soho in central London, while they were hooked up to brain scan monitors.
“There’s all sorts of things your brain is busy tracking when you’re driving from memory, your brain’s very active,” Spiers said. “However, all that just disappears when the GPS is in use. When you enter into a really busy roundabout, the particular bit of the brain for navigation is very active when you’re trying to solve the problem. Whereas if you’re going to a roundabout with GPS, your brain is not actively engaged in that at all.” WONDERFUL!
The study found the areas of the brain that switch off during GPS use were the areas associated with Alzheimer’s disease. “The hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex are two key brain areas that really get disrupted. It’s good to keep your brain active navigating and not just offload everything to GPS.”
Looking down at in-built satnavs in cars can also prove distracting, road safety experts say. You think? Like driving down steps, and out onto a mudflat?
AND I’M ON THE ROAD WITH THESE PEOPLE. IT’S A WONDER I’M STILL ALIVE!
I live in Colorado, so it’s unlikely that people here will drive onto mudflats by the sea. However, down steps, into lakes and off mountain roads are definite possibilities!
The advice from motoring organisations is to use satellite navigation systems when you need to – but not to be over-reliant on them. YOU THINK!
“If you’re going somewhere you’ve never been to before, our advice is to plan ahead so you have a general sense of where you’re going and the alternative routes available,” said Nicholas Lyes, policy and standards director at IAM RoadSmart, a road safety charity. NOW THERE’S A NOVEL IDEA!
He said in-built satnavs tend to be lower down the dashboard in the centre of the car, so people “might take their eyes off the road and look downwards”, which could be “highly distracting”. AGAIN. YOU THINK! “The best guide for getting from A to B is to use road signs,” Lyes added. ANOTHER NOVEL IDEA!
And if all else fails? “It’s a good idea to carry a road atlas for back-up, too.”
