300,000 imbeciles unaware that satellite navigation doesn't drive for them
A recent survey has revealed that satellite navigation systems have ’caused’ up to 300,000 accidents on Britain’s roads. More than 1.5 million people also claimed that they have performed sudden manoeuvres, changes in direction and blithely driven the wrong way down a one-way street at the bequest of their dashboard menace.
But the sat nav isn’t actually causing anything. It has no control over the vehicle. It just sits and makes noise and flashes topographical images at the half-wit who’s supposed to be in control of a half ton of fast moving plastic and steel.
Yet of the 2,000 people polled, one in five blamed the device for making them lose track of traffic on a busy road. Remember that the next time you’re out on the road, driving amidst the 14 million sat nav users, that one in five of them could AT ANY MOMENT be rendered blissfully unaware of the speeding traffic around them by just the presence of a GPS device.
I’m actually not at all surprised, having witness first hand some truly insane bits of motoring performed by people under the baleful guidance of their sat navs. My personal favourite was the bloke I spotted reversing down the motorway slip road.
Someone, anyone, with an important sounding title has to step in and point out the lunacy behind these findings, and that someone is Maggie Game of insurance giant Direct Line (where’s the slow-mo footage of a driver barrelling the wrong-way up a one way street for your ads then, eh?) – she points out “If a sat nav gives you an instruction that is likely to endanger other road users, ignore it.”
Holy-wow, you mean that if you don’t do exactly what they tell you to, they don’t get in a huff and refuse to speak to you for the rest of the journey?! That’s incredible! Whatever will these boffins think of next?
In fairness, if we’d conducted a similar service 20 years, 300,000 people would just have been too embarrassed to admit they crashed because they were checking the A-to-Z when they were supposed to be looking where they were going.
(via The Telegraph)
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