Driving through Todmorden, West Yorkshire, Robert Jones followed his GPS navigator, as he normally does. But what he didn’t know was that his navigator had decided Robert needed to die.
He continued following the steep path that the navigator told him was kosher, and totally where he wanted to be going. Suddenly, he hit a guardrail. Jones stopped immediately, so that his car was left hanging off the edge of a cliff. Jones said, “I just trusted the satnav. It kept insisting that the path was a road even as it was getting narrower and steeper. I rely on my satnav, I couldn’t do without it for my job. I guess I’m lucky the car didn’t slip all the way over the edge. But it has been a bit of a nightmare.”
The ironic part? Police arrested Jones. They charged him with “driving without due care and attention,” even though the real crime here, attempted murder, was clearly committed by the GPS. The lesson here is that you should at least occasionally look out the window when you’re driving, if only because your GPS navigator might want you dead. [BBC, The Mirror via Jalopnik Image: Marcin Wichary/Flickr]
Steve
Friday, March 27, 2009 at 1:24 PMI’m sure that when they did this on The Office they were thinking “nobody would every actually do something this stupid.”
Phil
Sunday, March 29, 2009 at 10:14 AMTodmorden is German for ‘Kill Dead’! I think the town is hexed.
Glen
Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 7:34 AMI would not have believed this, but a few weekends ago I too witnessed a GPS unit trying to send someone into harms way. I was approaching a freeway north of Edmonton AB from an intersecting road when I noticed a car in front of me stopped with its left turn signal on. Normally not out of the ordinary but this car was trying to turn south onto a exit ramp from the northbound lanes of the freeway. As the car was blocking my progress to get over the overpass to where I wanted to turn south, I gave him a few beeps of the horn. He hesitated then moved ahead slowly, then I could see that he had a GPS sitting on his dash, and it was obviously ordering him to turn left into oncoming one-way traffic. When I saw that I really laid on the blower, and when he finally turned into the proper southbound entrance ramp a couple of hundred meters further on (his gps was likely telling him to turn around when possible) he just shot me a dirty, albeit confused look when I blew by (swearing at) him. No thanks, no nothing for saving him from the harm the GPS was trying to inflict on the poor bastard..