Does your GPS do this?

[slofox]

Quote from the latest Consumer online report....

Model is the "Pierre Cardin GPS389"

"One of our tested units suggested we take a sharp right turn through a safety fence over a cliff. Fortunately others in our test performed much more competently as we put them through their paces on city and country roads"

""Pierre Cardin should stick to designing suits" says one of our test drivers. It's hard to disagree when the GPS firmly instructs the driver to "turn right" approaching the infamous Muldoon's Corner on the Rimutaka hill road.

Suggesting a sharp right turn through the safety fence into the void? We don't think so.

Muldoon's Corner is 500 metres on the Wellington side of the summit of the Rimutaka hill, and so named because it's tight and to the right (travelling uphill). The New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) has it scheduled for an upgrade. It's so tight that if two large trucks meet, one often has to back up. It was one of the roading projects fast-forwarded in February as part of the government's plan to boost the economy."

[Gremlin]

Thats probably because the way the corner has been drawn on the gps makes the gps think its a turn, rather than just a corner on the road. If the road name changes as well, it could be another reason for it to believe it is a corner, and dutifully prompt for it.

Yes, I'm taking the humour out of it but we encounter the same thing with garmin and open source maps, but the advantage for us is that you put in a map update, and the mappers fix it up.

There was a good one just north of dargaville, on our maps, where it thought you had to do a left right kink on a perfectly good straight. Just the way it had been drawn due to a side street.

[CookMySock]

"One of our tested units suggested we take a sharp right turn through a safety fence over a cliff."

That reminds me of a student pilot undergoing instrument flight training, is flying the aircraft with reference to the navigation ADF direction-finder indicator needle, and when the needle makes a sharp turn to one side, he enters the aircraft into a turn towards it. The instructor asks him "Do you think the airport moved?"

(The ADF is a radio-frequency instrument, and as such, disruptions in the atmosphere can and do affect it.)

Steve