VOSA

[Squiffythewombat]

it has everything and wall to wall totty as Graeme said

obviously youve never been to canterbury!

[lee67]

yes graeme, ive got an external ariel, cos my focus has coated windscreen, and my last car did...works fine with the ariel. cost me £15 from maplins, beware tho there is a few diff types with diff fittings..

[Wildfire]

I use a Sat Nav for my day job as a rep and couldnt manage without it...However, I am very aware of creating additional blind spots and I would think the RHS by the Windscreen pillar is one of the worse places for it as it makes a wide pillar even worse....Not good for approaching junctions and spotting bikes

Personally I have mine in line with the rear mirror but as low down as I can.
And if anyone tries to do me for my dangly air freshener I think I'd p*ss myself laughing

As for totty....I recommend a nice trip down to the coastal areas on a hot summers day

[clayderman]

And if anyone tries to do me for my dangly air freshener I think I'd p*ss myself laughing

You may laugh, but it's an MOT failure if it's hanging off your rear view mirror, that's if you have an inspector that's having a bad day.

[Stormin Ben]

Shouldnt even be anywhere on the windscreen IMO.

It should detect if the vehicle is moving and only provide aural directions. You can get £60 and 3 points for using a mobile but stanavs are just as distracting as dozy feckers meander along staring at them rather than the road, despite creating a nice bike sized blind spot for when the pull out of junctions.

Nicely irrational over-generalizing view there mate, you dont work for the government do you?
Sure, they have the POTENTIAL to be a distraction but I for one am sick & tyred of being legislated against for something that is just common sense

My work phone has GPS so it doubles as a sat-nav.
I have it stuck to the front windscreen
It is low down on the right side next to the pillar
The only blind spot it creates is 3" off my right headlight (coz I deliberately sited it to not create a blind spot)
It is fairly close to my eye line when looking out of the windscreen so it is not a major shift of focus to glance at it
My peripheral vision is still on the road ahead so I am aware of the car in front and any change instantly grabs my attention (eg brake lights, indicator etc)
It shows me where the road goes over that blind brow
It shows me that that corner tightens up
It shows me that just afer the corner is a decent straight so I may be able to get past the coach

Used correctly it is an invaluable tool and poses no more significant road safety hazard than a dirty windscreen or a nattering passenger
When will people realise (especially the government) that PEOPLE are the unsafe, dangerous morons not what they have in the car
On the M6 at peak times, sneezing or even blinking can be too much of a distraction and can make the difference between stopping and having a pile up
On the M54 at night the radio/CD/cassette is a safety aid coz its easy to drift off with nothing else to occupy your mind
On the M40 north at 5am it is perfectly safe to use a satnav, the mobile phone and eat a sandwich all at the same time

By all means have sat-nav placement as an item on the MoT but FFS dont ban them just coz some dimwit in a BWM hasnt got the common sense to actually THINK about the implications of its location

{rant mode off}

[Zakalwe]

I use sat-nav as well , but I position it down at the centre bottom of the screen. There is no blind spot as the CLK has a long bonnet.

The ones that really boil my p1ss are those that stick it in the centre of the windscreen below the mirror. You can see them driving around looking at the sat-nav rather than the road.

In my view, modern driving is isolating drivers (especially the thick ones) from the experience of driving...cruise control, speed limiters (in Mercs) air-con, lane control (Citroen, top end mercs, jags etc), mobile phone stuck to the screen, sat-nav stuck to the screen, etc, etc. modern drivers have more aides and comforts than ever before, yet treat driving as if it were some sort of computer game. They are isolated from the road, from other road users and drive as such.

Every f*cker who wants a car licence should be made to use a bike!. That would get the dozy twunt's minds back on the job in hand <rant>

[Kitch]

Good rant, and I actually agree with you.

I'm a pretty liberal person and live by a general philosophy of "If it harm none do what thou will shall be the whole of the law" (to paraphrase a quote)

I've had some very near misses directly caused by drivers on phones and one who was programming his sat nav and wandered over the centre line. (admittedly, this wouldnt neccessarily be alieviated in any way by this proposal that only affects the siting of devices - come to think of it, now I've thought some more about it, what actual point does this have? It doesn't make any real difference. Grrr... there's me thinking it was something good, and it turns out that (yet again) its a useless piece of shite to provide safety nazis with fresh soundbites that has very little real and actual benefit.)

FFS When are we going to get a government with the common sense and balls to overhaul driving standards properly rather than dream up laws that don't do anything. They're all the same in those parties and lobbies too. The amount of legislation for legislations sake from these equally irresponsible wombles in different coloured ties is boling my piss more and more.

TBH I'd so much rather have a much more stringent test and periodic retests to get a licence in the first place and sack all of this crappy law stuff that ultimately just ends up getting perfectly good law abiding people crap they didnt need. This particular one though, I can see the benefit. Maybe there should have been a few more smilies and less kittens in my original reply.

So, yeah... U-turn ahoy. Feck 'em and their law (as the wise man from the Prodigy said) I'm going to live under VTRgirls stairs.



*edit* comprehensivly changed on a frequent basis. Indecisive much?

[simon t]

OK, here's my three-halfpenny worth.

For those of you working as truckies and reps all over the country GPS is probably a useful tool. But how many of the sh1t-for-brains you see fiddling with 'this year's must-have' actually need sat-nav to find their way from the council estate to the dole office/bookies/chip-shop? Yeah right.

For leisure use, sat-nav is breeding a generation of sheep, blindly following instructions on how to get from A to B. Has no-one told them that the journey is as important as the destination? I’m old enough to remember my Dad using AA route-plans (which were the paper version of sat-nav) to get us from Blighty to whatever European destination he had chosen for our summer hols and a boring, miserable journey always ensued.

Me, I’ll take the paper atlas every time and seek out the wiggliest roads, highest peaks, deepest forests, biggest lakes – anything to make the journey more fun and provide a few surprises on the way. The only surprises sat-nav seems to provide is when it gets an artic stuck in a farm-track.

On the driving standards thing – I reckon it boils down to ATTITUDE. As a grumpy old man, my view is that no-one gives a stuff about anyone else these days and it shows in their driving. You can make the examination harder but it won’t change a selfish person into a generous one. The drivers with the best test results are 18-24 year old males who, the minute they get into a car with their mates, want to show off their machismo. All too often the result is a flaming wreck and grieving family.

So c’mon people, let’s be kinder to one-another. Peace, love and pass the joint, man.

[Kitch]

I still firmly believe all stanav voiceovers should be replaced.

Swap: "Turn left"

With: "Check there's nothing coming first, then turn left"

And what's with people who argue with the satnav. Thats like a step down from shouting at the telly.

[cupasoop]

And what's with people who argue with the satnav. Thats like a step down from shouting at the telly.

Whats wrong with shouting at the telly? I do it on a regular basis (I also argue with the sat nav sometimes.)

[storminateacup]

And what's with people who argue with the satnav. Thats like a step down from shouting at the telly.

I often shout at the damn thing when I am towing a 7'6" wide caravan and it tells me to turn left down what is clearly a 6' wide unmade green lane

I once went from Ashbourne to High Peak in Derbyshire and it took me down a road called "Over the Hill Road" it got narrower and narrower then it got a bit bumpy then I had to select 4 wheel low in the Disco the last 3/4 mile took me 20 minutes to get through. Luckily the caravan was on the site.

[tattie]

Simon is right the map is still the best way to take directions from. how many times have you been planning heading from a to b when you spot a twisty bit of road, sheltered bit of road, lower altitude road(less likely to be covered in ice or snow), higher altitude road (less likely to be flooded), more scenic bit of road.
Yes you can't beat the map, it allows you to use your common sense (mind you that aint all that common nowadays).
You will know the day the satelite packs up, all the sat navvers will be stopped at the side of the road scratching their heads.

Cheers

A.M.

[clayderman]

Whatever you do don't use the Yoda voice on your satnav, the little pointy eared bar*d says everything in reverse, by the time he's said "Turn you must in 50yds the way is left" it's all over