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0 pointsrurp3y ago0 comments

Yep, I've had Google Maps direct me to drive into a wall or an empty field more than a couple times over the years. It's not uncommon for people to get stranded or even killed by blindly following bad GPS directions. The maps are often quite bad in less traveled areas. And these are the non-malicious cases!

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lygaret3y ago

Sorry, this bugged me enough to try and find some data:

> It's not uncommon for people to get stranded or even killed by blindly following bad GPS directions.

Google took me to Wikipedia[0], which took me to a conference paper[1]:

In a corpus of about 400 news articles from 2010 onwards (via Lexus Nexus search), they found 52 deaths related to navigation technologies, which accounted for about 25% of the incidents they recorded.

57% of the incidents were collisions; someone running into something due to GPS giving bad directions.

20% total involved being stranded.

That's over ~6 years of US, UK, Canadian & Austrailian news reports.

It may not be uncommon for GPS to kinda suck, but it is _very_ rare for GPS to kill people.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_by_GPS [1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312936003_Understan...

rurpOP3y ago

I haven't done any deep research on the topic but know of several specific fatal cases off the top of my head. It's not like someone dies every day, but for every reported case there are probably many that don't get reported as such.

The much more common case is getting stuck and needing a rescue. Google maps is absolutely terrible at dirt roads. It will confidently give you directions that make absolutley no sense once you get away from pavement. It never got me stuck anywhere, but easily could have many times if I had been less cautious. Nowadays I know to ignore those directions in less developed areas.

I think the broader point is that driving navigation tech is getting fairly good at happy path cases but is woefully underdeveloped outside of that.

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