Inspired by Hellcat's topic, are you for or against the use of satellite navigation?

Would you rather plan your journey at home, and follow it through on the road and bask in the achievement of reaching your destination on your own planning, or do things the easy way and let sat nav do the work?

Should be interesting.

i dont have a problem with sat nav... if people want to keep fighting with maps... i say let them...

see too many idiots trying to read directions on a bit of paper or a map, driving all over the road

im pretty good with maps,can identify any gradient, feature etc, but have found since i have sat nav, when going to unfamilair areas, it takes all the 'sh**, i should have turned there' out of it. You just need to use common sense and a bit of inteligence with them. I could go back to not having one, and if im going to an unfamiliar part of the country, i will always look at a map to get a general direction, but it's when you need to find 34a fred bloggs st in a town 200 miles from home, just takes the stress out of it. I have used mine for several ebay driving missions (going on one of these tomorrow after work to pick upa pair of tannoy dual concentric speakers, in Preston), and though i know where preston is, i dont know it as a town, and i know i will get to where i need to be OK.

I dont always have it set to a destination, for exaple last sun, i decided to have a run from stoke to devon, and didnt use it at all, apart from using it as a speedo 9more accurate than my punto speedo) and for warnings of traffic jams, speed cameras etc.

I do feel they do makea safer driving environment, no matter how we are not supposed to, i bet most people have been reading a map or written directions for detail, but before i head off somewhere, i do tend to use a map or existing knowledge to plan which mway or A roads i need to use, and use sat nav for the 'strange town navigation',and be aware that they do occasionally try and send you the wrong way down one way streets, sat navs are very useful, but use with inelligence.

I see the advantage of sat nav, although havent bought one yet, maps certainly have there place and there isnt much to beat planning a nice drive through the highlands of Scotland. Sometimes the most direct route isnt always the nicest. But totally support sat nav.

my satnav dont take me most direct, it take be around stuff, some times that a pain in the ass though

Sat Nav is very good if you are in a City you do not know and there are many many roads. It will generally get you to your destination even if you take a wrong turn. But i think a map is easy to use if you are following one or two roads. Both are welcome by me, and always needy tools.

Andy.

Sat nav is brilliant. Even just planning a route then trying to f*ck it up by going the wrong way is amazin!

They have proven handy in the past when I've been on a deadline & worried about not having exact maps to hand, but I much prefer using a map to plan my route & if I get stuck I pull over to re-orientate myself.

Just the other week I was doing laps of Wymondham 'cos it has a lot of 1 way streets & turns that the Garmin I borrowed did not seem to see. The timing of the instructions it gives seem to be unreliable, & there was definately not roundabout in the middle of a Dual Carriageway (a slip road approaching yes, but NOT A ROUNDABOUT)!!!

Smiler121 said:

there was definately not roundabout in the middle of a Dual Carriageway (a slip road approaching yes, but NOT A ROUNDABOUT)!!!

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Surely observation and common sense prevails?

how do people in the midlands get on, they dont know what a roundabout is, is there special midlands ones that say island

When you drive for a living sat nav is a must, but it has taken me down some roads i would not class as fit for cars once or twice though.

i agree with both these comments...

chrisxr2 said:

When you drive for a living sat nav is a must, but it has taken me down some roads i would not class as fit for cars once or twice though.

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Ditto, a couple of times its sent me down potholed off-road type dirt tracks etc, leaving me wondering if i'm gonna need to replace my shocks by the time i get to my destination.

dave said:

my satnav dont take me most direct, it take be around stuff, some times that a pain in the ass though

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Happened to me a couple of weeks ago going to alton towers. Most direct route from here is probly straight down the M1 and across. Sat nav started sending me across the M62 towards Manchester I thought maybe it knows some A road that cuts out the 'across' bit further on? but no, west all the way to manchester, through several towns in rush hr traffic, south and then east. By the time i'd realised which way it was taking up, i was close to ripping the thing off the window and chucking it out of the car.

definitely a thumbs up, if only for the laughability factor of watching my husband try to outwit it with shortcuts

I used to be a delivery driver, white van man , planning your route on a map and then following it on the road is OK if you're going to your aunties for tea. When you have a train to catch or a meeting to get to give me the satnav . If you think about it a satnav is eco friendly, saves the time and emissions caused when people get lost. Also saves you money for the same reason.

Short Journies (Under 5 miles) or areas you know of, plan at home and get instructions from whoever it is you are going to see.

Long Distance and unidentified territory, Sat Nav.

I can see the advantages of sat nav but I've been put off buying one by the coach of my sons football team.
Every other week we all follow him to the away game and he's following his sat nav and every time we end up going a really long way round, using far more fuel than necessary. It's usually really obvious on a map which route to take but the sat nav always manages to pick the longest possible route.

RichDoblo120 said:

I can see the advantages of sat nav but I've been put off buying one by the coach of my sons football team.
Every other week we all follow him to the away game and he's following his sat nav and every time we end up going a really long way round, using far more fuel than necessary. It's usually really obvious on a map which route to take but the sat nav always manages to pick the longest possible route.

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He's probably needs to fiddle around with the settings, it took me a while to figure out the best settings for any journey. If I'm going to London I'll put it on Faster Time but, if I'm going somewhere within about 50 miles of home I'll set it to Shorter Distance. The difference is the type of roads it uses, Faster Time uses mainly A roads and motorways, Shorter Distance uses mainly local roads and rat runs to make the route as short as possible.

We used to have a parent in Scouting that was a bit of a t!thead & a gadget freak. We all set off to a summer camp at the same time, he arrived an hour after the rest of us
Boy did we rib him about that. When he went to the toilets we'd stand there shouting "turn left, take the next right..."

I like to look at the close ups on multimap of my destination & look at some of the aerial photography etc, it gives me a feel for the place. I then write some basic directions & have to say that I've never yet got lost.
I print off a couple of pages so never bother with the road maps - I've always got up to date maps & only ever have a map I need.

Always annoyed me that road maps had a huge map of central london in the back - WTF is that all about? if I wanted to drive in central london I'd see a shrink first.

I just don't like the idea of someone telling me which way to go. If I tell someone I'm going to Birmingham and then they start saying "you want to go this way bla bla bla" it annoys me and I deliberately go a different route just to be bloody minded.
If I had a machine in the car saying "turn left, turn right" I'd end up throwing it out of the window.