GPS is kind of like Siri — when it knows its stuff, it's great. When it doesn't, it can relay some very questionable information.
According to the Toronto Sun, a 23-year-old Ontario woman found this out the hard way when she followed her GPS directly into the near-freezing waters of the Georgian Bay. To put things in perspective, it was nighttime, rainy, and foggy, so her visibility was basically zero. She followed the route her GPS gave her, but unfortunately, it led her straight off of a boat launch and into the water. Things could have ended very badly if she hadn't acted quickly enough to roll down the window and swim to shore. The mistake, in those conditions, is apparently somewhat understandable because the boat launch looks like a road, and then just abruptly ends.
"She would have been driving on the road, and then all of a sudden just dropped and hit water," Const. Katrina Rubinstein-Gilbert explained.
But this isn't the first time GPS has failed its users. It's led people to precarious cliff drives and 800-mile detours, among other unpleasant occurrences.
Accidents like this do happen every once in a while. A GPS navigation system is only as good as the mapping database that created it, and these can sometimes get out of date due to recent construction or road name changes. Also, GPS relies on signals from multiple satellites, so in areas where these signals are less accessible — very rural regions and, on the flip side, cities with towering skyscrapers — there can be problems with correct directions.
To make sure this never happens to you, download a portion of a map from Google Maps before your trip. This way you can guide yourself if you get lost or lose service. And give dad props for always bringing an old-school foldout map in the car on road trips — at least that one never repeated "recalculating" over and over again.
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