GPS drivers lose their minds to life on dash

DAMIAN Pinkus is married but he likes to tell people he has a girlfriend he keeps in his car.

DAMIAN Pinkus is married but he likes to tell people he has a girlfriend he keeps in his car.

Her name is Muriel - "which is a pompous name, don't you think?" - and she speaks in a cool, soothing voice.

He says he loves her but what he means is that without Muriel he'd be lost.

Muriel is Mr Pinkus's portable navigation device, or global positioning system, which, depending on your point of view, is either the best thing to happen to Australian marriages since the invention of the shed, or the worst thing to happen to our roads since planners decided that trucks and holidaymakers could co-exist on a two-lane Pacific Highway.

More than 800,000 portable navigation systems - Tom Toms, Navmans and their like - were sold in Australia last year, and 1.4 million vehicles in Australia now use portable navigation systems.

But new research from Europe suggests that the systems are the latest gadgets to make a fool of their owners.

The most recent celebrated case of idiocy involving the device, which is basically a talking map, comes from Britain (already famous as the place where a coach full of elderly sightseers became wedged in a hedge, after the driver obeyed his GPS and drove straight ahead).

A truck laden with expensive vehicles last week made a 2600km journey from Turkey, across Europe to Britain. The driver was headed for Gibraltar, but his GPS directed him to Britain's Gibraltar Point.

It may be apocryphal, but in the US, the story that most commonly does the rounds concerns the guy who put on his GPS and his cruise control, and then got out of the driver's seat, and stepped into the back of his Winnebago, to make himself a cup of coffee.

He ran straight into a tree. The man told investigators that he assumed the GPS, coupled with cruise control would enable the car to drive itself.

Mr Pinkus says he's addicted to his GPS, in part because he's "terrible with maps". "It shows me the way. I find them unbelievably frustrating to have to do that myself, and it's even more frustrating when you have somebody sitting beside you, trying to read a map, and you're still getting lost."

Now, it's common wisdom that women, and in particular wives, cannot read maps, so who might Mr Pinkus mean?

"No comment," he said.

Grant Butler has a GPS built into his Nokia telephone, and he "throws it on the passenger seat, and it speaks to me".

He says being sent into streets that are cut off is common but the GPS often knows best.

David King, of the Navman company, said, "We do, from time to time, have complaints. Sometimes, it's user error. The classic example is people who go down a road when it says 'road closed', because the Navman told them to. We have a saying: Navman on, brain off."

The pioneer of private in-car navigation in Australia was German luxury car importer BMW, which released a system known as BMW Navigation in October 1997. It cost more than $5000. A hand-held gadget today costs about $500.