Thread: Idiots with GPS street directories!

I'm with you on that one Damo,

I have a magellan Median GPS (not a talking street directory gizmo), it sits in a mount on my widsceen when we go bush and it is awsome...

Around town though....it stays on my desk - it is just too easy to be looking at the screen rather than on what you should be doing when driving. Just don't need it.

I guess though many of the types that feel they need it in town.... would be looking at the street dirstory on the passenger seat rather than outthe windscreen anyway

Mark

mine tells me where to go.... no need to look at it,

and i can program it to take me anywhere in AU in under 20sec, which i do in the car park before taking off or on the side of the rode before i take off again. takes me more than 20 seconds to find what page the map is on much less try and read the useless bloody things at night. give me my gps unit anyday

idiots drive cars and gpses in cars and mobile phones in cars :P

dont knock the technology just because some dont know how to use it in an appropriate manner...

Hi Damo,

I agree with the thrust of your arguments but be very careful when you invoke the God of Legislation:

Originally Posted by damo

.....with my horn not working.... Maybee we need some laws about these things?

Understand the frustration Damo but have to agree on the its the idiots not the technology.

i also understand but if it wasn't for the fact i have destinator and i was working off a map i would probably still be looking for the rental property we live in...............

thats not to say i can't read a map i can just not while i'm driving ......and no good at memorising have a memory of a goldfish

what was this thread about again

dullbird

I would be lost without mine

I was in the Landie just two nights ago when a guy in front in a tarago type vehicle seemed totally lost as he was slowing then starting to turn just like he was getting told bad directions. You could see the screen on his dash too- at least mine dims automatically- his was very bright.
I figured he was a tourist, or idiot, as these things are pretty bloody good and give you lots of notice. They are even multilanguage. I had a mate who was going to Italy so I put mine on Italian for him- very funny till I realised the words are Italian too and I had no idea how to get back to English
Maybe in time they will become second nature as I took a while to stop looking at the screen.

I would be lost without mine

funny i got lost with my'n the other day 5 hours later

we decided the moral to this story is don't trust the gps on some unsealed roads....

we didn't know, we stupid, we come from uk, we no have dirt ROADS in uk

The technology is useful especialy out bush and I aspire to a system using 1:25000 survey maps for that purpose. But to have a system that only shows you a small portion of the path, as you go, requires quite a level of attention to it, and when you are not paying attention to the screen, you are trying orientate the outside with what the screen shows, not what's happening in front of you. There is the issue of focus response times, especialy at night, where it takes a couple of second or more to adjust from a small, well lit screen to a darkened, poorly illuminated environment.
The sensible thing to do, and what I do, is stop when you don't know the route further, orientate yourself, plan and go another leg. The one thing the GPS won't let you do is choose an alternate route based on peak times, known bottlenecks, toll aviodence. The talking versions have great merrit in this case alhtough can succumb to out of date data and rpogramming errors.
The god of legislation is only invoked when the people cannot help themselves or be trusted to to be sensible.