Woman Drives for 900 Miles Instead of 90 Thanks to GPS Error

someone driving under a bridge and having the roof of their RV torn off. Pay attention, it's a tool not common sense.

someone driving under a bridge and having the roof of their RV torn off. Pay attention, it's a tool not common sense.

Even if the GPS had problems this would not happen unless she had medical, mental issues.

with you mgarledge. There are obviously other circumstances that are not being reported in this incident.

And for hours and days...

Yes, the important parts have been left out...

... to say the least.

of blaming something else for your own stupidity. It's always someone elses fault..

This story reminds me of what happened to the Japanese tourist in Los Angeles who bought a ticket on United Airlines to Oakland. After several hours of flying, he realized he had been sold a ticket to Auckland...

The airline did give him the frequent flyer miles after all that...

Absolutely and totally driver stupidity!!!!!

On my way from Wichita, Ks to Laredo, Tx the GPS routed me to bypass OK city and on to Amarillo, it did not take me long (15 min)to figure out I was being led down the garden path!!!!!

(cue Sienfeld voice) That's a shame.

Hopefully there are no underlying medical concerns.

Sounds like there was also a brain error.

I agree this woman was probably a brick shy of a full load, but I think most of these so-called GPS "errors" have to be caused by input errors on the part of the user. I have, on occasion, been taken down a road that doesn't go where it's supposed to or being told to turn where a road no longer exists (or never did exist), but have never had my Garmin route me south instead of north or route me to Texas instead of Kansas. I know they can sometimes do quirky things, but some of these stories don't make sense.

I don't think this can happen, unless you are completely clueless of where you are going.

She must be a blond

That cannot navigate their way out of a paper bag. (Couldn't hit the side of a barn from the inside... You get the drift) They supplement their lack of directional skills with all kinds of tools, but rely too heavily on them, tossing common sense to the side. Mistakes do happen, but if your trip should have lasted under 2 hours, why the heck are you napping on the side of the road after driving 18? Don't be a dude...pull over and ask someone! Severe lack of common faculties if you ask me. Blonde jokes aside, the user in question must have had a serious disconnect with rational thought.

NOT TOO BRIGHT !

Her quote was:

"I was distracted, so I kept driving. I saw all kinds of traffic signs, first in French, then German and finally in Croatian, but I kept driving because I was distracted. Suddenly I appeared in Zagreb and I realized I wasn't in Belgium anymore.".

I'm glad I was not on the road with someone so "distracted"!

Sounds a lot like dementia of some sort. Alzheimer's perhaps...

That's quite a distraction to not notice something is off.

...selected the wrong destination to begin with.

I have had my GPS re-route me due to road work. It had me going 90 miles out of my way. I didn't take it. You need to have some common sense some times. The GPS is not always correct. As it turned out, the road work was for 1/4 mile down the freeway.

What the average time to travel from one side of the country to another? Isn't Belgium about the size of Rhode Island? So that means straight run 60 minutes tops. Yeah, it's the GPS.

We have become a nation of clueless

you can't blame Bush for this blunder!!

It's hard to tell what color her hair is since she's wearing a HAT.

http://www.examiner.com/article/gps-error-900-miles-grandma-...

under the surface. One should feel sorry for her and not think this was a funny incident, it was a sad story.

How distracted could you be to drive ~10-15 hours instead of 60-90 minutes. I would think that after a couple of hours, at worst, something might click.

...on this.

total zombie

Physcially not possible for the wheels to get enough fiction to go at that speed.

Sure hope you're in Belgium, because that's where this incident started.

I know someone just like that ... got around for years with no problems ... bought himself a GPS, now he can't find his way to the corner store without it. Seriously ...

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it's the dog's fault

There is a time for everyone to give up their autos. She has reached that time. It's both safer for her & others that she take public transportation.

Fred

Learning how to use a GPS may be challenging for some people particularly someone that age.

This is clear proof of the dangers of GPS devices. If even one one gallon of gasoline/petrol or one pound/kilogram of carbon is saved, we have to act, and act now.

Saw this story on another forum, and the general consensus there is that the GPS has little to do with it, and it's (very sadly) much more likely that the woman in question may have some form of dementia setting in (either early-onset Alzheimer's or some other form of dementia).

It's not unknown for folks with dementia (either via a progressive brain disease like Alzheimer's or via brain injury) to get very lost in driving--their brain basically loses track of where they've been. (Seriously, ask law enforcement some time about older people in the initial stages of dementia who trigger Golden Alerts because they've gotten hopelessly lost trying to get home.)

As some folks have pointed out on the other forum, this could well have been equivalent to driving across multiple states (Belgium and three of the four other countries she drove across are "Schengen states", which are in a compact where they share passport control--meaning she'd not have hit a customs station until Croatia).

Rather sad all around, and certainly she'll get her license pulled (Belgium--all of Europe really--have quite a bit stricter licensing requirements than the US does, comparatively speaking) but fortunately they also tend to be much better on public transport...

Yes. It appears that she could be easily outwitted by a jar of Marshmallow Fluff.

you can't follow it blindly. use your brain

The Chair-Keyboard Interface. Or with GPS, I think its called the Seat-Touchpad Interface.

Is she related to Chris Columbus?

I rarely use a GPS in a car where there are roads to guide you along your path.

But I often intentionally push the limits of my navigation skills and the precision of my instruments. Am I a stupid navigator? Probably!

However, each time I do something stupid, in my head I hear my mentor say, "The prudent navigator . . ." It has kept me safe, or at least aware, so far.

There is a "prudent navigator" saying for that one!

It is really easy to let the instrument do the thinking for you. This is especially true as the devices become more accurate and smarter.

It becomes so easy to follow the GPS because it is so accurate and so clever and is never wrong. It is an easy trap to fall into and it catches even the pros all too often.

So, I can understand why a driver might trust a GPS over their own intuition.

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Bud

Is all of Europe now border-checkpoint free? She crossed several international borders and this didn't give her a clue?

Texas

Pretty much until she hit Croatia, she was driving in what is known as the Schengen area (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area)--basically a compact of European countries that, as far as customs and border controls go, act as a sort of "super-state".

Basically, you hit a passport/border/customs control upon entering the Schengen area (either at the border proper or at an airport or seaport) and you don't hit a customs or border point until you leave the Schengen area; the countries in the Schengen area consider someone being allowed in one "Schengen country" good for entering the rest, and (for all intents and purposes) crossing between countries within the Schengen area is pretty much directly akin to driving to different states in the US or (more properly) driving from Ontario to Quebec to Nova Scotia up in Canada.

So (completely aside from the very real and very sad possibility she's going into dementia that is making it unsafe for her to drive) she well COULD have not hit a border control until Croatia.

(As an aside--it's actually quite possible to enter via France and not hit a border patrol checkpoint until you hit Russia from Latvia--save for the UK and Ireland (which have their own scheme for exit and entry) and the Balkan states, almost all of the EU (and even those European countries not part of the EU) are in the Schengen area.

(It's also rather lucky for her that she didn't try to pick up her friend later this year--Croatia is due to join the EU in March 2013 and will be joining the Schengen area as part of its EU membership. Otherwise she could well have ended up in Bosnia or Serbia! )

Some distraction...

What brand of the GPS the old lady using?

A GPS does not relieve you of the responsibility of looking at a map. We occasionally overrule the GPS, so the GPS and the map should be partners, not mutually exclusive tools.

Well first she was a 67 year old lady,who know what destination she put on her Gps. plus the Gps is telling you how many miles you need to drive and the time of your arrival. and when you are making a trip of 900 miles vs 93 and do not realize the mistake. Sorry granny but you should not even be on the road.

Use GPS as a tool and never lose your common sense. I have heard many stories about GPS crazy drving it is an addition.