Have you ever connect your GPS system to a car ride, for example on the outskirts of Lisbon, and end up not making the slightest idea where it is, despite being just a few kilometers from the city – and even to see in the distance the road leading to the bridge over the Tagus? Or that your GPS insist to turn left at the next intersection, where a sign on the roadside indicates that the destination that seeks to achieve is right? Or, take to the streets that end in stairways, with its GPS to insist that it is a road passable? Or, on the contrary, the GPS does not “see” a road that has existed for years, which opens right there in front and that seems to be the best way? In short, as certainly it happened to you that your navigation system seems to have gone mad, leaving him / her on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The point is that, often, the map used by the GPS is not properly updated and we see on the screen, our lost vehicle in the middle of the landscape
These are examples. – Harmless, although annoying – than a global positioning system (GPS its acronym in English) can lead us to do blindly trust him and we do not use our head. But, throughout the years, apart from ridiculous episodes was also fatalities -. And a number of incidents which might have ended very badly
One of the most tragic examples – which is known to have had the do with a GPS system – took place in August 2009 in the uS. More precisely, in Death Valley (better known as Death Valley), north of the Mojave Desert in California.
Alicia Sanchez and his son Carlos, six, were found by a park ranger . The mother was about to die of dehydration (temperatures can reach 50 degrees at that location during the summer), and lying delirious in the shadow of his all-terrain car. As for the child, had been dead for some time within the vehicle.
“[Alicia] told me that he had taken the wrong road,” explained the guard, Amber Natrass, quoted in a 2011 article in the local newspaper The Sacramento Bee . “And that was following the advice of your GPS.”
“It’s a phenomenon that I’m starting to call ‘death GPS’”, stated in the same article Charlie Callagan at the time coordinator of the Natural Park Death Valley. “People rent cars with GPS, have no idea how the system works and are willing to believe that the GPS will direct in the middle of nowhere.”
Since then, the maps used by the GPS in that area – sometimes show roads closed for decades or potentially dangerous, they have been updated, but not quite. The task is daunting, given that it fixes to a great level of detail (not just in Death Valley …).
In less funereal record, the site chain north American TV ABCNews reported in 2013, the case of three Japanese tourists who were stranded in the mud. Your GPS indicated a road between the island and want to reach the continent where in fact there were 15 kilometers of water and sludge. The tourists ended up having to leave the car when the tide began to rise. There were no injuries or casualties, only a scare.
According to the same site in 2009, a Swedish couple on the way to the island of Capri (off Naples), written evil fate in GPS and ended in Carpi, a town in northern Italy. “Capri is an island, but even found not in fact the strange having to cross a bridge or take a boat,” rebelled is in charge of the Italian tourism.
Even in the ridiculous record in 2011 , a truck whose driver followed the directions of his GPS just stuck between two buildings in an alley Bruton (UK).
And in 2016, in Catalonia, tourists looking for a restaurant followed in five vehicles per a dirt road through the vineyards. When they realized the GPS error, tells the magazine Decanter , turned around and destroyed 200 vines planted decades, with damage estimated at 8000 euros.
“People trust such way in their GPS that they forget to look out the window to make decisions, “commented Micah Alley, search and rescue coordinator of the natural parks of the USA, in the aforementioned Californian daily.
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