My sexy Sat Nav and I - a love affair!

A Devonshire man charged with the murder of his teenage fiancée claimed he was only following the instructions of his satellite navigation system!

Daniel Ford, 25, from Crediton told a jury at Exeter Crown Court on Tuesday he was not responsible for killing 19-year-old Jessica Jimny and thought he was being given directions to his mother's new home in Plymouth.

According to Ford, the couple got into their car in their garage and he entered the address into the satellite navigation system as usual. However, instead of being given directions, Ford claims the machine instructed him to murder Jessica in cold blood.

Ford told the court: "I thought something was a bit wrong when instead of being told to turn left onto the A374 the sat nav told me “after 200 yards kill your fiancée”.

"But I just thought the machine must know better than me so I just did what it said. It was only after I had hosed the garage down, chopped up her body, wrapped it in a carpet, put it in the boot, had a shower, went to the pub for a few hours and came home and watched Deal or No Deal that I realised what I had done.”

Prosecutor Don Capri said: "This is a clear example of someone trying to avoid responsibility for their actions by blaming it on malfunctioning technology.”

Satellite navigation, or sat nav as many of us call it, is wonderful. I love it!

There I am, chugging along in my Jennmobile, watching the primroses and snowdrops of early spring, and occasionally the road ahead, when a sultry, sexy voice emerges from my dashboard and invites me to turn left in 100 yards at the roundabout. Ooh, it makes me shudder with pleasure to think of his gorgeous voice.

“Dave-Dave”, as my partner Paul calls my sat nav, sounds very sexy. I've stopped going out driving with Paul because my sat nav is far sexier and absolutely never gets the route wrong and then blames me. And I can shout at Dave-Dave as much as I like and he never answers me back.

Having picked up more than one newspaper over the weekend I noticed they all contain a similar story about how satellite navigation systems have made thickos of us. No longer, so the reports go, can we read a map, and as a result we lose crucial information about the places we are in. An example; a sat nav would not tell you that you were passing Stonehenge like a map would….although you would hope as someone drove along the A303 they'd recognise it!

The reason I'm mentioning this is that it just so happens that I heard a very funny sat nav tale the other day. I won’t name names but someone I know was travelling from the Buckinghamshire area to the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. He (yes, he!) punched the details into the sat nav and off he went. Unfortunately he didn’t put the route in properly and had instead reprogrammed a previous destination that was in the depths of Surrey.

So what did he do? He listened to the sat nav, took every turning it told him to take and was completely oblivious to the fact that he was heading into Surrey, in completely the wrong direction. It was only when he telephoned the person he was meeting and said "I'm here, where are you" and they said "I'm here too, where are you?" that he discovered he was hundreds of miles away.

When I was told this story I cannot deny that I laughed so hard I nearly pee'd my pants. How someone could be directed, as I presume he was, along the M25 and then onto the M3 where there are signs for Bournemouth, Brighton, etc. and not realise they were a long way from Kent was beyond my comprehension.

It’s ironic though that as we include more technologies into our vehicles we probably see accident rates go up, instead of going down.

One can argue that with airbags, GPS navigation, and other technologies such as cell-phones, entertainment devices, etc. that drivers have emboldened themselves with a sense of invulnerability, over actually using these technologies to enhance their safety. The problem with sat navs is that the road conditions change quicker than their information database.

Sat navs are often used by long distance lorry drivers as many of them come from abroad and don’t even speak the local language. They are not to know that the road which the sat nav advises them to take has now become a one-way or blocked off at one end. The biggest problem is that sat navs don't show low lying bridges. Knowing that they can't turn around, many lorry drivers will attempt to get under the bridge anyway but then get stuck. Paul and I have been driving across Dartmoor’s beautiful country lanes and come across a lorry completely stuck and unable to turn around, with cars in front of us tooting their horns as if the poor lorry driver could suddenly do anything about it.

Some drivers could definitely benefit from brushing up on their geography skills, with a Polish lorry driver reported to have found his way to the Gibraltar Point nature reserve in the UK, 2,500km from Gibraltar on the southern tip of Spain where he was supposed to deliver a load of cars. I’m guessing the new owners of the cars had to wait a little longer.

So certain drivers probably shouldn’t be allowed to have satellite navigation systems in their cars. For instance (thank you Google), a couple of months ago a middle aged driver, obeying his sat nav’s command “Turn right now!”, jerked the wheel over and crashed into a roadside toilet hut 30 yards before the crossing he was supposed to take. A couple of weeks prior to that a pensioner also followed their sat nav and ignored a “closed for construction” sign on a highway. They ploughed into a pile of sand at relatively high speed.

I know, I know. All I can think about is what great practical jokes you could play on people with such total willingness to do whatever a machine tells them…..but I suppose that would be wrong.

So it seems that in spite of all the incredible new technology we have access to, the good old map will always have a place in the world. The newspaper reports today appear to be spot on. However sexy and compliant he may be, Dave-Dave makes us stupid…...although it's possible that some of us may already be stupid any way.