Satnav woes.

I use google maps on my phone and like your son even on a route I know well as it will often reroute me off my usual route because of some holdup or accident especially when using motorways. Annoying that he got it so wrong though.

I've ditched my Tom Tom Sat Nav. It's only a year old but beyond useless.
I've gone back to using Google Street Maps. However, you still need to keep an eye on it as it does stupid thigs too.
My daughter is the same kircubbin2000. I just let her get on with it.

P.S Has anyone found a fairly reliable system they can recommend?

I will never forget my satnav telling me to make a u-turn on the M25.

I use Google maps. The satnav was the third person in our marriage and my husband used to argue with her too!

Waze is a brilliant app. It’s on our phones and we find it very accurate.

They are useful for going to unfamiliar places but I rarely use them since I retired.

Years ago I was a passenger when my friend drove us to a hen-do. I knew the area well and told her we didn't need to sat nav.

On the return journey she ignored me and put it on, only for the journey to take two hours longer due to road works. If she had taken the short cuts I suggested we would have been much quicker but there you are.

Over reliance on technology is never a good thing, and there have been lots of threads relating to these issues recently.

sat navs are useless! wanted to visit a Hobbycraft in a place unknown to us once, part of a large garden centre, pet store, etc and it directed us to a wood!
i hate the flipping voices too kills any conversation

I would also recommend Waze, but whatever navigation assistant you use, make sure your common sense is in the driving seat!

I agree that Tomtom is useless. My first one was OK, it usually got me there and was easy to use. Then I bought a new one...bad idea. It took me all over the place and a journey up through France which should have taken 5 hours, took me nearly 8 hours. It gave me the wrong speed limits resulting in 3 fines and 3 licence points. It failed to indicate a major diversion and kept sending me round in circles I eventually ended up in someone's garden and almost made me miss my ferry. Then finally it failed to recognise the instruction to adjust to GB roads. I returned it to Amazon. Before my next long journey I changed my car..it has its own integral satnav and works fine.

I use Google Maps free app on my phone if I’m on unfamiliar routes . I find it accurate and haven’t had any problems with it. I don’t like looking at the screen so I leave it closed in the cup holder and just listen to the audio via the car’s bluetooth.

The only annoyance is if I’m listening to a radio chat show and it cuts in to give a direction and silences the radio to speak. Always when someone is in the middle of an interesting point.

I've had Tom Tom for several years. Regularly informed "time to update" which I do.Never been let down. Occasionally I use Google maps on phone if going somewhere I've perhaps been before but not wholly sure of route. Google, I find not good at notifying diversions.

I once inadvertently set my satnav to "Marine Parade" in the wrong south coast seaside town and was halfway down the motorway before I twigged that I was going in the wrong direction! Obviously a dim day...
It's best to avoid mistakes by getting the postcode from somebody at your destination. They'll be aware if the "postal" version of the postcode will take you to the wrong entrance or just to the middle of a general area and can give you instructions to put into your satnav.

TillyWhiz

I use Google maps. The satnav was the third person in our marriage and my husband used to argue with her too!

My husband simply ignores her if he doesn't like her instructions. Sadly our new satnav only has a female voice, our last had a male alternative and he took more notice of him.
If we're driving together I simply turn the sound right down and only speak to him about the route if I know that we're veering wildly off course.
It's very useful if we're advised of traffic jams or roadworks, but he always insists on staying on the road if it is his preferred route. Because of this we've spent many hours stationary on major roads.

I rarely use mine..only if I don't know the area

We are always getting lost and end up arguing. So this time I'm prepared. We are going to Buxton and I have looked on Google Maps scrolled right through the directions to near our destination and have written down the way to get there. There are 8 left and right turns so if tom-tom doesn't work we would have definitely struggled to find our holiday rental.
I am also going to plug in the mobile in car to see if I can get it up on the screen. We've never bothered before.

We have an inbuilt one in the car, I find it always gets me there but sometimes uses very strange routes to achieve its aim.
Hubby on the other hand wont follow either my instructions or the sat navs and always goes mental at it for getting him lost, or going the wrong way round. If he listened to all the instructions it would get him there but he always knows better....or so he thinks. I always drive if the two of us go out together somewhere we don't know as it is easier than listening to him rant and rave.
Not be the first time I have stopped the car and offered him the chance to get out and make his own way back home, cos Im nice like that.

We use Waze, but even that can have its moments. Last year we programmed it for a route from Newbury to Wilton House , near Salisbury.

DH decided not to use a dual carriage way but a single carriageway A road that ran parallel. Not usually a problem, it quickly recalculates. In this case it didn't. I won't bore you with all the details. All I will say is that we ended up in a maze of tiny roads somewhere near Salisbury going round in circles. Thankfully we had a road atlas in the car and that rescued us and got us to our destination. At which point Waze woke up and announced triunphantly 'You have reached your destination'

Well, anyone using a SatNav is, frankly, asking for trouble. As GSM said, "U-turn on a motorway"?! [maybe it meant at the next junction, but with those things, who knows??).

Stories abound of giant trucks being sent down tiny country lanes - and then struggling to reverse back again! -- and a friend out dogwalking almost got run down by a courier van who was using a track that isn't a made-up road, but a SatNav shows it as a road, so can have nitwits using that shortcut without looking properly.

We have nice mapbooks, and if going somewhere new, plan the route. Google prints can show general plans of a town or city, then more detailed street maps, and they can all be printed off to reference. For traffic news, use the radio so that the bulletins cut in with any late news.

I'm not surprised that tech-mad youth thinks that maps are 'old hat'. The Apprentice show, last year I think, featured groups who had that task to find a dozen or so items, at the cheapest overall prices, and report back at a given time, end of the day. They tried to use maps on mobile phones, instead of doing a common-sense thing of buying a map and planning a time-saving route. They both ended up running round town (Brighton I think it was) like the proverbial headless chickens. Neither group found the main market, where they could have quickly obtained several items!

A few years ago sadly we were having to travel to Aberystwyth to attend my husband's cousin's funeral, which was to be held at 2 pm. Satnav said it would take 4 hours, so we actually left home at 8 am, giving us 6 hours, enough time to have a coffee/comfort stop and still be in good time.

I am not a satnav fan so I always have my map book to hand. I became suspicious when we were passing towns that my map indicated were nowhere near where we needed to be but DH thought that the satnav knew best ...

Long story short, we came to a junction where the satnav said we should turn right, taking us into North Wales (!) but I insisted we should turn left as indicated on my map. Not being able to deny what was shown on the map, DH did turn left and we made it to the funeral with 10 minutes to spare, no comfort stop, no coffee, nearly 6 hours after we'd left home. So I am now never without a "proper" map!

A sat nav is not a replacement for common sense. Too many people are completely ignorant of the geography of this country and would be hard pushed to locate Manchester on a map.

We always check routes on google maps before we go and the person in the passenger seat has the road atlas on their lap. We set the sat nav but generally only use it for the last few miles of a journey where you are quite often on small roads, in one way systems, or making lots of turns - hence the confusion around Salisbiry, referred to above.

The first time I used a satnav I had borrowed it from my brother in law. We were travelling to a part of the country that I didn't know and towing a trailer with a yacht on it. It did a good job and I was overjoyed that it actually gave me notice of upcoming turns unlike my normal navigator (husband). Within a week we had bought our own, a Garmin. It was amazing and took us, and my sister, all over Europe. Eventually it died one day and I set off into the wilds of North Yorkshire to visit a company that said they could hopefully mend it. Although I am a reasonably good navigator, and I was armed with an outdated map, I couldn't find it at the very end of the journey. Two weeks previously, I had bought my first smartphone, but only used it to call and text. For the first time ever, I turned on mobile data and Google maps. Eureka, I was only 200 yards away. When I found out the exorbitant cost of the repair I decided that I would just use my phone in future.
When we changed our car it actually took me a month to realise we had an inbuilt satnav. To be fair I rarely use either my phone or the satnav unless I am going somewhere new. Most of the young people I know constantly use one or the other.

I use google maps these days and find it very accurate with door to door service. The map also shows any prospective delays on the route and if they are severe gives an alternative choice.

Garmin years ago in France kept telling us to turn round, when we were following road signs to our destination, and once took us up a narrow dead end in a small village, when we should just have stayed on the large road which missed the village all together. Am just going to try Wayz.