Death by GPS.

A local case today, though only the rental SUV died, the humans were uninjured:
Women escape sinking car after crashing into Mercer Slough
Visitors in SUV follow GPS directions into Mercer Slough

A TV story indicated that the GPS system in this rental vehicle is named 'Never Lost'.

 

GPS is taking over our mind!!!

 

The cases mentioned it sounds more like the GPS was filling a vacuum in someones skull.

 

Another couple gets stuck in the snow on a closed road, leaving Yellowstone National Park, but survives the week. This is a wonderfully beautiful route in summer, but the GPS doesn't know about winter closures.

I first saw this on the ABC Evening News, but here are more links:

Billings Gazette: Wisconsin couple stuck on Beartooth Pass wrote, recorded goodbye notes before rescue
ABC: Couple Missing After Yellowstone Visit Found
ABC: Couple Stranded in Snow for a Week Wrote Farewell Letters
Wunderground: Missing Wisconsin Couple Stranded for Days in Yellowstone Subzero Temps, Snow Rescued
blog: Technology, travel and near tragedy
Daily Mail UK: Couple stranded in Yellowstone for a week say navigation app was cause

 

Saw this today: Driver follows GPS off disused bridge, and wife dies, police say - CNET.

 

This family was stranded only one day, rescued this morning:
Family rescued after 24 hours in mountains
A couple and their 12-year old daughter were driving a rental truck in Colorado and relying on GPS for directions

I put their origin and destination into two GPS routefinders, an offline ancient copy of Microsoft Streets and Trips, and online Google Maps. Both produced very different but immediately recognizable Wth?! winter routes. And Google even selected a National Forest road alongside Belmear Mountain, their real (approximate) stranding location.

Anyone with a paper map or any winter mountain sense should have noticed that route as a very rotten suggestion even without local details about just which National Forest or BLM roads are open/closed in winter. A simple adjustment to a route near Telluride and through Placerville adds only 5 minutes to the estimated trip time, while putting the whole trip on major (paved, maintained) roads with up-to-date condition reports on the state's official COtrip website. Which, btw, displays plenty of icy road and blowing snow for considerable distances today.

Reminder: if traveling in wintry or mountainous areas, don't become a news story or a statistic. Don't blindly follow GPS, look close to see of the suggested route makes sense. Use the most major roads available, not some remote desert or forest road shortcut. And be prepared with food, water, and clothing, both to camp out in the vehicle overnight and to walk out for help tomorrow or whenever the weather finally clears.

And don't count on having cell phone reception in remote areas.

 

Two days and nights stuck in snow on a route selected by a nav app, but found safe:

Travelers spend two days in snowbound SUV before being rescued in SW Wash. | KOMO

 

A week stuck in snow on a route selected by a nav app, but found safe:

Man spends seven days stranded after his GPS directed him to an unplowed mountain pass

 

What I like best about the GPS is that it allows me to explore with confidence that the GPS will always get me home again.

I've had a few odd experiences with GPS in the 30 years that I've been using them. Once the Magellen brand unit in a rental car obviously lost the satellite signals and used some defective dead reckoning algorithm that blindly showed us driving through a reservoir that was a mile away. Another time, on the way to Las Vegas, the Garmin GPS spent 20 minutes trying to get us out of a swath of pasture and onto the two lane road just 1/4 mile north of our position. Garmin did not know that we were on beautiful a new stretch of Freeway.

There are lots of snow caused deaths in the pacific northwest. A few years ago there was a freak snow storm in central Oregon. A couple of elderly women were driving on a frontage road and got the car stuck in a dip in the road. For some reason they did not leave the car. They died of hypothermia.

Dan

 

One time I tried to use GPS on a smartphone and it setup a course over Pearl Pass, a 4x4 only Jeep trail during the summer and unmaintained during the winter. It was also winter when I used it. Good thing I knew the area and just went down the correct road for the car and season. I've also been sent down some rather unusual roads, like some farmer's ditch access, by following GPS just trying to find an address.

On the other hand I've tried to set up a route over a road that I already know and is open and perfectly passable in a normal car just simply to see what the distance is (I did this a lot when we had the Nissan Leaf) but the GPS would refuse to set up a route over that road to the point that I could put on stops along the road that were just a couple miles one from the other and it would set up the route to go 170 miles all the way around over a completely different set of highways to make it from one point to the other as if the road I wanted to go over weren't connected there.

One thing that drives me nuts is when I go down to the city and it sends me down a several lane highway or street and then immediately asks me to exit on the opposite side of the road meaning I have to suddenly cut across several lanes of furious city traffic to make the exit.

GPS also doesn't always get you back home. I've had it send me back to the same closed road over and over again. And I'm not talking about a road that was just recently closed either.

The other gripe I have about GPS is that when we leave the house I like having the GPS set up so I don't have to pull over and get it going. But then my wife complains that the GPS is going off telling me where to turn for the first part of the road that we already know. But even though I love her a lot, she's just not a map or GPS person. So once we get down to the big city I have to figure out how to get off the freeway so I can set up the GPS to take us where we need to go.

I think that GPS systems like Google Maps are getting better. But for the aforementioned reasons I prefer to just study the map before leaving home and having it in my head where I need to go. Not that my internal GPS doesn't lead me astray from time to time. It's especially hard for me to get around in places that don't have mountains and are cloudy. Without being able to see the position of the sun, moon, stars or mountains my sense of direction gets all messed up. I also got messed up once driving down through Mexico since I forgot that in the tropical zone the sun can appear on the north side or south side the sky around noon depending on the time of year.

 

I think that you need a gps that gives you features that you want.

I've used garmin for the last 20 years and it has features that has helped me.
Not only can you download POI collections into the gps, but you can add your own custom POI's.

( POI Factory | GPS and other interesting topics ) I like the Offbeat Tourist Attractions, because you wouldn't want to drive right by the "worlds largest ball of string" without knowing about it.

You can then define a trip, and list the POI's that want to visit. You would use this if the default routing does not give you want you want.
You can name those trips (routes), and keep a collection of them.

Garmin also assist in lane changes prior to an exit. It will advise as to which lane to get in and give a visualization of what the intersection looks like. It does not do well for in city turns because of the short distances. If the garmin model is slow, its almost useless, but the newer models are better.

You can also add rules, like no U-turns.

Also you can block out certain areas that you would like to avoid, like certain dangerous intersections, bad neighborhoods or even entire cities. I live in MA, and on occasion I like to visit Florida, and almost every gps you find will route you right through the middle of new york city. So I just draw a block around the city, and it wont take me there any more (I put a block around Washington DC as well).

But to be honest, I actually use three gps units. The garmin for navigation, waze for impedaments ahead, and the gps built in the car which is a always north facing map view that at a glance I can see, the next charging station, the next city, and what state I'm in.

Good luck and happy gpsing.

 

Are those updateable? That would be a good feature if they have it. And along with what you're saying they sound much better than Google Maps.

I've also used the built in ones in two cars, our Nissan Leaf we used to have and the one in the Toyota Avalon hybrid we have now. What bothers me about these is that they become outdated and then less useful, and it costs hundreds of dollars to update them. The Avalon's GPS system, along with a lot of other infotainment things like Bluetooth, USB music and the like, have also stopped working again, and now I just use the FM radio because that's all that works and I'm not going to the dealer to have the stupid thing fixed again so that in a few months it stops working again.

 

Many models are free lifetime map upgradeable, for 4 times a year, and you don't lose your settings while doing it.

 

For now I still am using the Toyota nav that came in the 2010, and can vouch that it also has these features. I generally run it in the split-screen mode, where I keep the left pane zoomed out more and North-up, and the right pane zoomed in more and travel-direction-up.

On the approach to a turn, it will automagically replace the right pane with a view of the upcoming intersection and an arrow showing the correct path. On an expressway, it will switch to a view that shows the exit ramp.

Overall, I don't have many complaints about the built-in nav, other than that the updates aren't free (and the ones for Gen 2 aren't being made anymore).

 

Just be sure to buy a model that includes the lifetime free upgrades. Without that, upgrade costs will soon far exceed the original cost of the unit.

 

I made a typo, and it is too late to fix ...

UPDATES. Not upgrades. Customers can download free map UPDATES, not turn the hardware unit in for free upgrades.

 

As long as the updates are upgraded, then it makes sense. If the updates are downgraded it doesn't.

 

Yet another lost-by-GPS case. One died of exposure (hypothermia) while walking out for help, while the other stayed in the car and survived:

Hunter finds missing Oregon mom dead, daughter alive in Idaho forest
Elderly woman dies, daughter found alive after getting stranded in Panhandle National Forest, deputies say

I don't find the specific location on a map, but the particular forest is in north Idaho, stretching east of Coeur 'd Alene to the Montana border, and mostly north of I-90. It was very very far off the 'normal' route from Pendleton Oregon to Utah.
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PS. Solitaire Saddle is pinned on this map. The incident was in this general area.

 

Is there a moral to these stories. 15 Best Short Moral Stories to Make You Rethink Your Life | AQwebs.com
Mine would read something like "And the moral of this story is know the Pros and Cons of any New Technology you are depending on", or " Some car navs and better than other car navs"