Comments on: When SatNavs Attack

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 22:22:50 +0000

A lot of people got the idea that the gadget can do a better job of figuring out how to go places than they can. That is exactly what the navigation technology companies want people to think. Now they want to hide behind some fine print disclaimers. I say Good Luck to the people suing.

Reasonably intelligent people will have about the same incidence of success and error using their wits and a decent map as they will using sat-nav. The former is cheaper, and has the inestimable advantage that the more you do it, the smarter you get.

By: Biks

Biks — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 13:02:05 +0000

I always thought and still think that the legal question is pretty simple and obvious. The nav is an assistance system so all responsibility is still with the driver.

From my time as railway engineer I know what it means to put legal responsibility on a device as it is for example the case for interlockings. You keep the system as simple as possible because the effort to make really, really sure that the system does exactly what it is supposed to do and nothing else is at least twice the effort of developing it in the first place. I doubt that that’s done for usual cheap car nav systems including all their fancy features.

By: Simstim

Simstim — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 08:28:53 +0000

One thing I have noticed with the increased use of Sat-Navs by commercial traffic in the UK is that you quite often encounter lorries/vans on the back-roads who are obviously taking a “short-cut” (and consequently are going too fast for the narrower, twistier roads they’re on) rather than just going to somewhere on those back-roads. Oh, and of course you then get the “HGV stuck on humpback bridge” issue a lot more.