Mastodawn

It's not so much for knowing where one is going. It's for showing the passengers what the expected time of arrival is, *and* for telling the damn vehicle what traffic warnings to put up. (It only puts up on-route traffic warnings.)

Amusingly, when I told #EnterpriseRentACar that the satnav in the #FurdKuga had failed with what seems like a known manufacturing defect of years-long standing (https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/115360036753077087) the company rep asked earnestly whether I wanted to switch vehicles.

I explained that I could quite happily get around without it.

One of the trips I did was to Gatwick airport, where I had never been. I just memorized that I needed the M25 and the M23, and did the the rest from reading road signs for a few hundred km. It was an utter doddle. Lumping an old Philips road atlas in the back just in case was overkill.

The only thing that I lacked was a reliable guide to whether I'd arrive on time for the flights.

@cstross
#driving #cars #SatelliteNavigation

JdeBP (@[email protected])

I was impressed by the rented #FordKuga, until, just 9 hours in, the satellite navigation system stopped receiving position information from any satellites. (Its satellite status screen shows outline bars for all of the satellites, instead of the normal solid ones. There's no clue in the doco, which typically for Ford does not match the real vehicle, what that means.) A quick search of the WWW turns up a Kuga owners club forum, where threads about the Kuga sat nav breaking, including but not limited to aerial problems that require authorized mechanic intervention, date back as far as 2013. Also interesting is that this 2025 model Kuga uses both the U.S.A. #GPS and the Russian #GLONASS; but there seems to be no mechanism for picking just one, nor one for adding #Galileo, which one would think to be an idea for the U.K. market. I have one idea, a seemingly unrelated sounds setting that I turned on right before parking and coming back to the failure, to try. #Ford #GNSS

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