What's wrong with a sat-nav that points north?

It's time, comrades, for the uprising. Time for the overlooked and marginalised to rebalance the scales. We've waited too long already. We must act- and we must do it on behalf of good, right-thinking, sensible drivers everywhere. The scourge of the god-awful 'direction of travel' satellite navigation display mode has its boot on our throats; it can no longer be borne. It's time to reclaim satellite navigation as a useful tool for those who can read a map. Those who do understand that Naughty Elephants Squirt Water, or they should Never Eat Shredded Wheat. Who do know roughly which way their bonnet is pointing and would simply like a system that makes it possible to keep it moving, and pointing that way, without getting snarled up in tailbacks, roadworks or provincial town centres. For years, we ignored the threat. It grew quietly on the periphery of things as a novelty, an amusement. It was an extra mode on the Sin screen of your 'Dame Edna' BMW 5 Series or Mk1 Range Rover Sport, that you could show off to passengers, before reverting to the one that, well, you know, made sense. But then its equally pointless, distracting and cantankerous friend 'bird's eye view' came along-and people seemed to like it. Every aftermarket, sucker-mounted TomTom system, licked-n-sticked inside the windscreen of every Vauxhall Vivaro delivery van, Skoda Fabia school-run regular and Suzuki Baleno hire car had it. Every dad's Christmas stocking had one. And simply by sheer weight of numbers, people began to think that that's what satellite navigation was. Some uselessly zoomed-in view of a car on some featureless road, a crudely digitised rendition of what you could see out of the windscreen anyway but with a big blue route super-imposed on top of it that extended into the middle distance, going around corners, junctions and roundabouts and requiring all the mental acuity of a mixed salad to correlate it with the world ahead. Junk food, basically, for your built-in navigating compass that was rapidly taking on the role of cognitive couch potato. It was the beginning of the end for the need of the average driver to take the remotest bit of interest in where they were, which way they're actually heading or which way they needed to go next. Now look where we are. People are addicted to navigating as if playing some 1990s coin-op video game-and the industry is feeding it. I estimate that as many as half of all the new cars I've tested this year came with factory navigation systems that no longer had a proper, north-up display mode that follows your position on the road and can be zoomed in and out to suit your preference. Some have 'route overview' modes, which are similar but not quite the same ; some let you switch or pivot the map view around to a north-up orientation but, for some reason, stop actually following your position once you have - as if assuming you had seen a funny town name that you wanted to chuckle at for a bit longer (to be fair, Wyre Piddle is quite funny). As a result, I find I'm using factory navigation in test cars less and less. I know that the Google Maps app on my smartphone works well enough in the way that I prefer, and most test cars let me use it. And right there, in an instant, an entire fitted system, developed and supplied at someone's cost, is dead to me. Presumably some software developer has decided to take these 'north up' modes out of their offerings, no doubt on the strength of market research that says people don't use them, because they prefer the zoomed-in 'Out Run' modes they've been fed like sweeties. Modes which, incidentally, are about as useful for telling them where they are in the world-and actually helping to avoid traffic jams up ahead when suddenly it becomes obvious that there's a need to as submarine sonar. These developers are not drivers; we should not be dictated to by them. And I, for one, refuse to bow down to their 'direction of travel' nonsense, because I'm not nine years old and I don't need to be 'in the map' to know where my roundabout exit is.

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What's wrong with a sat-nav that points north?

'Direction of travel' nav display modes are fostering cartographical impotence

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main menu

What's wrong with a sat-nav that points north?

'Direction of travel' nav display modes are fostering cartographical impotence

More from Autocar

Top 10s

Latest car reviews

Top manufacturers

Quick search

We recommend

Legal bits

About Autocar