Computer says no go!
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I’ve run into something similar in Toronto: my GPS told me that I was arriving at my destination while I was on a bridge with nowhere to turn. My destination (an old factory) turned out to be below the bridge (and a pain in the ass to find even when I figured that out).
I think many years ago the road ran at the ground level and crossed a set of railroad tracks, and the factory was accessible from the road. At some point in the sixties or seventies, they built a bridge over the railroad tracks but never changed the factory’s address.
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A local, much loved cafe had to close recently because the guy delivering heating oil trusted his GPS and pumped oil into the wrong building via an old unused valve, filling the basement and ruining thousands of dollars of supplies.
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Back in the late 90s, when GPS was still fairly new, there were mad stories on every news site re: GPS-inspired driving fuckery. One in particular has stayed with me.
A German chap drove his Mercedes right into a construction site, ignoring his wife’s pleading and the workers who dove out of his way. He told her to shut up, and kept on driving until either heavy machinery or something finally blocked his way.
I posted it to my stumbleupon, and a much-missed German friend in Berlin immediately jumped on that story. He bitterly complained about how easily led too many of his fellow Germans can be, and sketched the driver’s saying to his GPS, “Jawohl, mein Führer!”
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Crashing a Ford GT is criminal! Did the guy not do any research on the vehicle at all? Even an experienced manual transmission driver would do well to be cautious the first time driving one, as the transmission is far from standard and the vehicle itself is a handful even then. It’s not a daily driver.
Might as well try to go from a Cessna to an SR71 Blackbird for a quick flight to a municipal airport…
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There were bodies of water in different countries that people regularly drove into because of GPS (even when there were bridges). People just assumed “the water must not be as deep as it looks, because the GPS ‘says it’s safe.’” I wish it was confined to one country…
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Waze is terrifying even when working correctly. When I had a commute in Los Angeles, I tried it for a while. It would regularly ask me to make unprotected left turns across six lanes of high speed bumper-to-bumper traffic, U-turns in questionably legal places, change over four lanes within 50 feet, or other shenanigans. It thought nothing of risking my life to save eight seconds. Once I figured out the insane maneuvers weren’t saving any real time, I went back to Google maps. You could tell all the Waze drivers, too. There was always a pack of us trying to make these same ridiculous moves in the same nonsensical places.
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