If your Sat Nav told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?

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Are you one of those lunatics that spends more time watching the virtual reality of your sat nav’s screen than actually looking at the road? You’re in company. Robert Jones followed instructions from his Sat Nav until half his car was dangling off a cliff.

He only stopped because a wire fence preventing him from getting any further – completely ignoring the fact he was driving down a dirt track three metres wide. The police have charged him with driving without due care and attention, and he describes the incident as a ‘nightmare’.

(via BBC)

Econav Sat Nav: The tree-hugging satnav

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Driving green is totally different to driving fast, and the Econav, from Vexia, knows it. The Econav will deliver you exactly the same speed, traffic and gear change info as a regular sat nav, but instead of showing you the fastest way to go, it’ll show you the most economical.

For example, if you’ve got a carful of people, then it’s going to be much better for you to use a motorway than country roads. It’ll take into account your car, fuel and occupancy level. The manufacturers claim that it’ll pay for itself in reduced fuel usage within six months. The price? £200. If you’re not often in a hurry, then it could be worth a look.

Vexia (via ShinyShiny)

Textecution – an extremely clever mobile app that stops you texting while you're driving

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So, go on then, guess how a mobile phone app can tell if you’re driving or not? Speed of texting? Pauses while texting? More errors than usual? Drastic directional adjustments detected by the iPhone’s accelerometer as you hastily steer away from the bus stop, off the pavement and back onto the road?

Nope – Texecution uses GPS to locate the position of your phone, and therefore you, deactivating the phone’s SMS features when you seem to be moving at more than 10mph.

There is, of course, an override function for when you’re a passenger, on buses and trains, or running really fast…

uHavePassed.com provides driving theory software for mobile-toting Learner Drivers

learner-driver-tricycle.jpgThe CEOs at Luzia Research must be done quizzing their teenaged offspring about what the ‘yoof of today want to help them in passing their driving theory tests, and have launched uHavePassed.com for UK driving-hopefuls.

There’s a free version of the software on the site, available to download to mobile handsets, which contains more than 1,000 driving theory questions and related games to aid you in your aspirations to tear…