GPS are among the hottest items at electronics stores: those global positioning navigational systems for cars. They take the guess-work out of getting where you need to go – or do they?
They're half as expensive as they were two years ago, and by the end of this year one in four American households will have least one of them.
Most frequent users, like Geek Squad computer repairman Jose Orengo, rave about them.
"My GPS has taken a lot of stress off just knowing that I can just pop any address, and I could just follow it to the T."
But GPS devices are hardly perfect, as cabbies or limo drivers like Rob Rodriguez can tell you. "I can say that once a day I'm like you – it got me to the wrong spot!"
Now, GPS horror stories have even seeped into the popular culture. They've been used in a Nationwide Insurance TV commercial and featured as a joke in an episode of "The Office."
The problem isn't in the hardware; the satellite-based technology is dead-on accurate. But it's the information fed into the hardware that too many drivers follow blindly.
Addresses, cautions, hazards, and detours – so much changes so frequently that it's impossible for the companies like NavTec, that provides the mapping information for the big GPS makers, to keep up.
Cliff Fox is with Navteq's Map Division. "You need to buy updates, and today a lot of people don't do that."
The consequence can be a school bus that was decapitated by a too-low overpass; the driver said the GPS told him to take that route.
Or a driver blaming his GPS for leading his SUV onto railway tracks, where he got out just before a train smashed into it.
Less dangerously, uncorrected GPS errors send convoys of vehicles to the wrong addresses, like the truckers who kept waking up the homeowners in a New Jersey community because that voice in the box told them there was a factory gate here.
Fox adds, "There needs to be a level of common sense that goes along with the use of these systems."
