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Google Maps Error Misleads Row of Cars Into the Mojave Desert (sfgate.com) 138

"Every car we were driving with was heading that direction..." Shelby Easler says in a TikTok video, "so we assumed this was going somewhere..."

But SFGate reports that instead of a handy "alternate route," Google Maps was leading her and her two passengers "far off the major highway and into Nevada's fierce deserts on an off-roading trail." Easler's car were not the only bushwackers. In Shelby's viral TikTok, a trail of cars closely follows behind them. "The first driver that turned around talked to us to tell us that the road gets washed out the higher into the mountain you get, and we have to turn around since the path leads nowhere. He was in a huge truck and was just driving straight through the bushes and shrubs to let people know to turn around," Easler said.
1.5 million people have viewed Easler's earlier footage of their road to nowhere. The off-roading trail was apparently only wide enough for traffic in one direction, and attempting to return in that other direction, "We were driving over bushes and rocks and alot of the cars couldn't even make it," Easler says in the second video. "Which is kind of why our car broke down."

They told SFGate that ultimately "We had to leave the car in Vegas, and it got towed to the service center of a dealership. They said the rear, right tire was coming off, and the alignment was messed up too. Low-key a pretty expensive fix."

They eventually called the highway patrol to shut down the road that Google Maps was sending people to, because "With every car coming in, every single car was getting trapped."
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Google Maps Error Misleads Row of Cars Into the Mojave Desert

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  • by dknj ( 441802 ) on Saturday November 25, 2023 @10:36AM (#64030647) Journal

    Better go against all of my better judgement and keep pushing forward because technology can never be wrong.

    Good grief!

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. Whenever you think people have reached peak stupid, something like this happens.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by buck-yar ( 164658 )
        I blame Google. My driveway is listed as a town road, despite submitting fixes through their process. When I did a search, others have the same issue. Google mappers wants to turn anything drivable into a public road. Google knows about this kind of problem but appears to choose to ignore it. One guy already died driving off a bridge that google said was ok to drive through. Not sure what else has to happen before Google accepts changes made to their property.
        • by Calydor ( 739835 ) on Saturday November 25, 2023 @11:33AM (#64030735)

          The guy driving off the bridge (through the bridge, technically) would have done so with or without Google.

          It's a map. Nothing more and nothing less. It is up to the driver to exercise THINKING and DECISION-MAKING while behind the wheel of their car. Anyone who says, "Well, this looks like I'm driving into the desert when I was expecting to head downtown ... it's probably fine!" is a candidate for an eventual Darwin Award.

          • by Rhyas ( 100444 ) on Saturday November 25, 2023 @11:37AM (#64030741) Journal

            Sure, it's just a map now. But in the self-driving car future, it's going to be slightly more critical.

            • by gweihir ( 88907 )

              Not a problem. Self-driving cars must be able to react to unexpected hazards in time. It is only humans that are incapable in that area.

            • by Calydor ( 739835 )

              To a self-driving car there is no difference between a bridge that washed away five years ago and a child that chases after his ball right this instant.

              It has to recognize a problem and fucking STOP.

          • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

            The guy driving off the bridge (through the bridge, technically) would have done so with or without Google.

            It's a map. Nothing more and nothing less. It is up to the driver to exercise THINKING and DECISION-MAKING while behind the wheel of their car. Anyone who says, "Well, this looks like I'm driving into the desert when I was expecting to head downtown ... it's probably fine!" is a candidate for an eventual Darwin Award.

            I think the driving off a bridge thing is more excusable for the driver because appare

          • by sjames ( 1099 )

            It's a bit more than just a map, it actively advises you of the route to take from A to B. The old Rand McNally never did that.

            I know of a few barely navigable "roads" that start out looking like perfectly normal narrow paved roads, but in the middle of the woods the pavement abruptly ends. If you can figure out where the dirt path is under the leaf litter you eventually reach pavement on the other side and intersect with a more normal road again. By the time it becomes clear that the road is more of a vagu

          • The guy driving off the bridge (through the bridge, technically) would have done so with or without Google.
            It's a map.

            Well... yes and no. With a traditional map, one always wonders, even if just slightly, if they're reading it correctly and that involves some thought. With Google Maps (and others) people simply assume it's correct and seem more likely to follow it w/o thinking. Personally, I've never used a map app on my phone, but have used Google Maps to pre-check a route before leaving and sometimes even printing it out -- but I always remain a little skeptical when reading it ...

            • You're about 15 years behind with that approach.
              • You're about 15 years behind with that approach.

                Sure, but I'm also not lost/stuck in the desert with, potentially, a broken axle, etc... Nor have I ever driven off a bridge.

                • True. But the problem isn't the app, it's situational awareness of lack thereof. And while blind trust in the machine can be a problem, you are missing out on useful information if you don't use it at all.
                  • True. But the problem isn't the app, it's situational awareness of lack thereof. And while blind trust in the machine can be a problem, you are missing out on useful information if you don't use it at all.

                    Granted, but, so far, I haven't traveled much to places where I'd need it -- and I have pretty good situational awareness. :-)
                    Google Maps is there on my Pixel 5a should I ever need it, though ...

          • by ThumpBzztZoom ( 6976422 ) on Saturday November 25, 2023 @06:08PM (#64031403)

            It's a map

            No, it is only a map until you enter navigation. Then it is an extremely limited view of the surrounding area which rotates with every turn and provides no context to know where you are, what direction you're heading, or where the road goes.

            It's a tool designed to maximize data collection. Studies have shown the more you rely on turn by turn navigation, the worse your sense of direction gets, which leads to you using it more.

            It is pretty clear this is intentional, because if you zoom out Google Maps during navigation, the map stops following your location, and your icon will travel off the screen until you press "recenter" and return zoom control to Google. It's the only GPS system out of the 3 I use that does this. There's no technical reason for it. You are the product, not the customer.

            • by Calydor ( 739835 )

              I only have my own personal experience to go by, but I only use turn by turn navigation when going through areas I'm not familiar with, or where I know I always end up missing a turn somewhere. For anything else I basically use the GPS screen as a minimap in a game; a quick glance to see if I'm nearing the turn or not. There's one in particular here that's nearly impossible to see at night since it's just a long, long, LONG stretch of road with no lights, and you only realize you missed the turn when the ma

            • by jeti ( 105266 )
              The design is to reduce cognitive load. It let's you better focus on the road. Everything else is a welcome byproduct.
              • Sure, not letting me select the level of zoom I want to see and keeping me from seeing the larger picture is "reducing cognitive load".

                You know that actually means "reducing the use of the brain"? You realize that not using their brain at all for navigation is exactly the problem which the people in this article had?

                If you see this as a positive, you desperately need to increase your cognitive load, that muscle has seriously atrophied . Keeping you navigationally stupid is Google Maps goal.

        • by taustin ( 171655 )

          Not sure what else has to happen before Google accepts changes made to their property.

          A big enough lawsuit would do it. So would criminal charges, though sadly, that's pretty unlikely to happen.

        • The error here is the same as your driveway: algorithms thinking a line on a map is a road, when it isn't. Beyond that, the system is WAI. They asked it for a way through when the highway was closed, and as far as it knew, it found one.
        • by StormReaver ( 59959 ) on Saturday November 25, 2023 @01:04PM (#64030937)

          I blame Google.

          I blame stupid people. When I was a kid in the '70s, and we had to drive across the county (sometimes job transfers, sometimes visiting distant relatives), my dad would get a current paper atlas and plan the route we would take. He would hand-write the distances, turns, and approximate travel times for each segment of road we needed to take. He would circle all of our planned rest, meal, and overnight motel stops. He would use a highlighter to mark the route on the map in order to make it easier for my mom to navigate while he drove undistracted by the need to reference the map. The two of them together were a well-oiled team.

          We would drive a thousand miles or two, and we were NEVER lost. We would hit construction zones, detours, and all forms of diversions, and we would ALWAYS find our way back to our planned route using simple map-reading skills. It was a breeze.

          Now we have people who, among stupid things like thinking "Low-key a pretty expensive fix" is an intelligent expression, can't plan a trip or read a map. If some disembodied voice tells them to drive into the desert, into a lake, or off a pier, they do it without thinking, "would that be a stupid thing to do?"

          NOTHING changes just because the map is electronic. Plan your trip, and tell Google Maps what your route is. It allows you to alter the displayed route and have it announce the turns and distances for that route.

          YOU are responsible for where Google Maps sends you. YOU have the ultimate say in where you go.

      • by taustin ( 171655 )

        This is marginally less stupid than literally driving into a lake [autoevolution.com].

    • Most of the cars must have been driving a CRV or RAV4.
    • Now I'm not very worried about my car, and I go some strange places, but I've had to keep going on some pretty strange roads at times and it has almost always worked when the nav says so so I have a bit of sympathy. I tend to be equipped to survive and walk out if I do get stuck so it's not quite the same thing, but still I can see how you get there.

      • When I go any distances, I always bring my "zombie survival bin" with us. It's got several MREs, solar blankets, various first aid kits (and a bit more), tools, fire starters, water tablets, etc. Hand-crank radio emergency radio, hand-crank flashflights; I'll be adding a small solar recharger to it soon. It's enough to go off-grid and survive for at least a week with food. I've I'm stuck someplace longer than that due to some disaster, I figure we're all pretty f*cked anyway at that point lol.
    • Better go against all of my better judgement and keep pushing forward because technology can never be wrong.

      Good grief!

      We need to stop protecting people and let nature takes its course. If you can't realize that turning from a paved road onto a dirt road in the middle of nowhere probably isn't the route you should take, do we really want you as part of society?

    • Better go against all of my better judgement and keep pushing forward because technology can never be wrong.

      Good grief!

      Except in this case they weren't just trusting technology, they were trusting all the fellow drivers who were taking the same route (not realizing they'd been mislead by the same technology). And that's not a terrible idea, sometimes the crowd is wrong, but usually, the crowd is more right than you are. In this case it was a mistake, but in another case the road gets good again and you realize why all those other drivers thought it was a great shortcut.

  • by rlwinm ( 6158720 ) on Saturday November 25, 2023 @10:37AM (#64030649)
    Expect far more of this as AI gets added to things. At the behest of a few friends I tried ChatGPT and the others for a few of what I consider very simple programming problems as well as a few general "find a URL for XXX" - it didn't give me even a close answer once. I suspect it's because being a fancy statistical model it can't really handle broad questions that are outside of what it's had direct feedback and training for.
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      That is how statistical models work: They give you _something_ from the training data that matched best. Whether this is actually useful, defective in non-obvious ways (for coding: security) or complete nonsense depends on the training data and the statistical model has actually no way to find out.

      And that is why statistical models cannot be used for anything were correctness matters without competent and careful fact-checking the answers. That may well cause more effort than doing without that artificial m

      • And that is why statistical models cannot be used for anything were correctness matters without competent and careful fact-checking [ of ] the answers.

        Indeed.

      • by Rei ( 128717 ) on Saturday November 25, 2023 @11:47AM (#64030771) Homepage

        That is how statistical models work: They give you _something_ from the training data that matched best

        That is not how they work at all. They do not contain their training data. They're not databases. They're not compositors. They're generalizers. They learn concepts and the interrelationships. You can make an AI memorize things, but that's an extremely inefficient way to do so, and generally training datasets are far larger than weights - and even where they're not, you train based on eval_loss, not train_loss (eval_loss = testing with data not in the training dataset, to see how well it's generalized rather than how well it's memorized).

        Talking about them as "statistical models" or "compressors" is similar to the old joke about a person who gets lost on a hot air balloon, shouts "Where am I?!" down to a person below, the person shouts back, "You're in a balloon!", and the person decries their luck at having encountered a (insert-job-that-tends-to-give-true-answers-that-lack-useful-insight-here).

        Everything below applies equally to whether you're talking a biological or non-biological system:

        1) Decompression is the same thing as prediction, and vice versa [youtube.com].

        2) Compression and generalization are also equivalents.

        3) Learning requires a measure of error, which - in undirected-learning circumstances (aka normal circumstances for complex organisms) - requires prediction, to compare predictions vs. encountered realities.

        4) Any system which cannot be perfectly predicted is "statistical".

        WE - humans - are compressors. Generalization is compression. We compress reems of data constantly streaming into our senses into generalized chained rules of how the world around us works. We then are constantly generating predictions about what our senses will encounter, using our vast generalized model of the world. Statistical, noisy predictions. The errors between what our senses encounter and our predictions provides the error that allows for weight readjustment.

        Neural networks, likewise, generalize. They capture concepts and the relationships between concepts (example here [distill.pub]). These generalizations are how they work with scenarios that they have never written about before. Nobody has ever written before, say, an essay about the similarities between the War of 1812 and the movie Caddyshack. But if you ask GPT-3, it'll do just that:

        While the War of 1812 and the movie "Caddyshack" may seem unrelated at first glance, let's get creative and find some quirky similarities:

        Unlikely Heroes:

        In both the War of 1812 and "Caddyshack," unexpected characters emerge as heroes. Whether it's a groundskeeper battling a mischievous gopher or an obscure militia successfully defending against a powerful army, these unlikely heroes play a crucial role.

        Battlefield Tactics:

        Both scenarios involve unconventional and humorous battlefield tactics. The War of 1812 saw the use of tactics like guerrilla warfare and hit-and-run attacks, while "Caddyshack" showcases the absurdity of golf course warfare, with the groundskeeper employing outlandish methods to combat the gopher.

        National Identity Crisis:

        The War of 1812 was a defining moment for the young United States, solidifying its national identity. Similarly, "Caddyshack" explores the clash of social classes and identities at the fictional Bushwood Country Club, highlighting the struggles between the established elite and the newcomers.

        Epic Rivalries:

        Both the War of 1812 and "Caddyshack" feature intense rivalries. On one hand, you have the historic conflict between the United States and Britain, and on the other, the comedic rivalry between characters like Al Czervik and Judge Elihu Smails in the golfing world.

        Cultural Clashes:

        The

        • by Rei ( 128717 ) on Saturday November 25, 2023 @12:28PM (#64030859) Homepage

          Or to put it another way, to quote Sutskever: "It may look on the surface that we are just learning statistical correlations in text. But it turns out that to "just learn" the statistical correlations in text, to compress them really well, what the neural network learns is some representation of the process that produced the text. This text is actually a projection of the world. There is a world out there. And it has a projection on this text. And so what the neural network is learning is more and more aspects of the world, of people, of the human conditions, their hopes dreams and multivations, their interactions in the situations that we are in. And the neural network learns a compressed, abstract, usable representation of that. This is what is being learned from accurately predicting the next words. And furthermore, the more accurate you are at predicting the next word, the higher the fidelity, the more resolution you get into this process."

          • by gweihir ( 88907 )

            Yeah, keep dreaming. Or rather hallucinating. ANNs cannot actually "learn" anything in the usual sense of the world. That is just a marketing lie.

            • I suspect that there are multiple kinds of learning/remembering (there are multiple kinds of thinking after all) and that one of them is similar to the way these models work, where it's based on comparisons and not really on retention (even if what we're storing is very different.) We throw so very much data at the system all the time, many orders of magnitude more than the software is getting, it's improbable that we can store a vastly larger percentage of it than ANNs do.

          • by HiThere ( 15173 )

            But language is a INCOMPLETE model of the world. It doesn't include those things "everyone knows that". And yet those things are the most necessary to dealing with the world. This is (part of) why I think true AIs will need to be embodied. (If I'm right, once they learn to handle one body, they can generalize to handle other bodies, and then generalize to figure out things about those living in other types of bodies.)

            The problem is that learning involves LOTS of mistakes. And it's a lot cheaper to expe

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Seriously? Are you stupid? I never wrote anything about them _literally_ containing the training data set (although that can happen for parts and _has_ happened).

        • Everything below applies equally to whether you're talking a biological or non-biological system:

          Rei is hallucinating here. This entire post is a bizarre conflation of what the natural biological NNs do, and what the massive networks of simple functions in ANNs, called "neurons" by loose analogy to biological neurons, actually do. Or how biological systems are organized, and the massive but flat and homegenous structure of deep learning systems. The type of hierarchical feature extraction that is the rule in natural NNs is entirely absent in all deep learning systems which is why image recognition syst

      • by taustin ( 171655 )

        As one expert in the field said, it knows what the right answer should look like, but that's not the same as knowing what the right answer is.

        And the flaws are inherent, because what's its trained on is "the internet," most of which is bullshit, propaganda, and outright lies. And the first "L" in "LLM" is for "large," which really means "massive." The training data is so vast it isn't possible to vet even the smallest portion of it. There's no possible way to build an LLM A"I" without the majority of its tr

        • On Wikipedia: I find it disturbing people still think of Wikipedia as a useful source of factual information despite their ridiculous enforcement of silly policies.

          I'll use it to look up a movie star or other bullshit that doesn't matter but never for anything where facts are important.

          • by taustin ( 171655 )

            On a non-controversial subject, it's useful to find references to actual sources (which must then be assessed for whether or not they're useful, of course). But yeah, that's about it.

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Yep, that nicely sums it up. It will come up with something that looks like the right answer, whether it is or not because it simply cannot tell the difference. The bad-quality training data is certainly a major factor as well. Although I doubt it is the only one.

        • by Rei ( 128717 )

          Contrary to popular myth, LLMs trainers do NOT just treat all data on the internet as equivalent.

          Once again, surprise surprise, experts in their field aren't morons ready to be put in their place by random commentators on the internet.

          • by taustin ( 171655 )

            Experts in the field are either pointing out the limitations and warning people to not take anything at face value, or so full of shit they're more ridiculous than the LLMs.

            Mostly, they're experts at raising money from investors.

            • by Rei ( 128717 )

              You clearly are not listening to anyone who is actually involved in developing LLMs.

              Who also are not fundraisers.

    • by Rei ( 128717 )

      l "find a URL for XXX"

      You apparently seem to think it's a database. *facepalm*

      If you want a database doing keyword lookups, the tool you're looking for is "Google". Artificial intelligence - right there in the name - is about having the ability to reason.

      TL/DR:

      Database + keyword search: insane amounts of info, exact answers, but dumb as a rock

      LLM: less info, and inability (at present) to assess its own level of confidence (without some very processing-intensive tricks** which you won't find on a public in

    • by PPH ( 736903 )

      We'll know when they get AI maps done right. When the app replies (in a Maine accent) "You cahn't get they-yah from hea-yah."

  • by fredrated ( 639554 ) on Saturday November 25, 2023 @10:38AM (#64030653) Journal

    look out the window when you're driving.

  • Should not be allowed a driving license. Driving a 2 ton vehicle comes with a certain responsibility and an expectation of the driver having at least a small amount of common fucking sense.

    Today they just screwed their own cars, tommorow maybe it'll be "Oooh, that looks like an on ramp ... hey why are all those cars heading towards me and honking!"

    • by taustin ( 171655 )

      Should not be allowed a driving license.

      People this stupid should not be allowed out of the home without a keeper.

  • maybe (Score:4, Informative)

    by groobly ( 6155920 ) on Saturday November 25, 2023 @11:30AM (#64030731)

    Can't be sure without knowing the exact road, but what frequently happens is that one of these roads can be paved for the first mile, for example because there is a power line right of way that maintenance needs to reach, and then it turns into a dirt or gravel road. You can be merrily going down the paved road and all of a sudden, no more pavement. If there is a long line of cars behind you, maybe you figure it's only unpaved for a mile, because turning around appears impossible.

    However, "Nevada's fierce desert" is a quote from someone who has never been there. This time of year, it's totally nice. The only problem that occurs is that there is no water.

    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      But the Mohave is in southern California ... near Los Angeles.

  • by alanw ( 1822 ) <alan@wylie.me.uk> on Saturday November 25, 2023 @11:37AM (#64030743) Homepage

    The 1996 tragedy of the Death Valley Germans [wikipedia.org]

    The blog of one of the searchers [otherhand.org]

    • Iirc there was also a gps glitch that had tourists driving into the water in Hawaii a few years ago.

      As if they didn't notice the giant blue wet thing they were approaching.

  • Love my paper maps. BLM and the Forest Service produce some good ones, Quadrangle maps are also handy.

  • "so we assumed this was going somewhere..."

    You know the old saying. When you assume, you make an ass out of me and an ass out of you!

  • All over europe. Used imaps (or whatever that pos os called),
    google maps, tripadvisor, etc. Theyey are all horribly imaccurate:
    - "according to the map we are in the ocean"
    - highly reviewed restaurants that did not exist
    - routed on foot even though there was a metro right at our dest.
    - routed on metro lines that were still being built
    etc.
    Pathetic. But they don't care, because: CLICKS!

    • I've had a lot of success with OsmAnd Maps. It's free, at least the version I use, and works off-line. The paid versions are just extended functionality. I've never needed them. Here's a link, if you're interested:

      https://osmand.net/ [osmand.net]

    • These were all mobile phone based or also those that come embedded into cars? Just out of curiosity.

  • In the last week Google Maps also led me down a dirt road. I've used Google maps in that area before, and it's never led me down that direction. Possibly they made some changes recently that started leading people in wrong directions.
  • Saves Gas! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Saturday November 25, 2023 @12:35PM (#64030879) Homepage Journal

    I have a household member who wants to take the Google "Saves Gas" routes.

    Even when they're stupid.
    And Google has no idea what kind of vehicle she drives.
    And it adds 50% travel time.
    And the road is too rough for the vehicle's ground clearance.
    And there's no cell coverage there.

    "But it saves gas!"

    "No, seriously it doesn't - that doesn't even make sense."

    "BUT IT SAYS RIGHT HERE!"

    What's not "green" is dealing with all the nth-order effects.

    Julian Jaynes had good scholarship on how humans are susceptible to The Voice of Authority.

    About 20% of Americans can resist it.

    The rest vote.

    • I have a household member who wants to take the Google "Saves Gas" routes.

      Even when they're stupid.

      A friend of mine has a dad who had a variation of this. He read an article once that UPS was able to save a few million dollars a year in fuel costs by making their truck routes make right turns wherever possible. So, he did the same.

      Nevermind that even $10 million a year to UPS is less than 0.1%.

      Nevermind that UPS trucks make dozens, if not hundreds, of stops daily, so optimizations involve reordering deliveries to optimize the turns.

      Nevermind that "making three rights" to make a left eliminates any saving

      • UPS' reason for avoiding left turns isn't to save fuel, it's to reduce accidents. They have a lot of data showing that their drivers, in their trucks, have significantly fewer accidents if they never have to turn left across traffic. Whether that applies to your friend's dad as well, I couldn't say.

        I have a brother who is a UPS driver, and he avoids left turns when possible when driving his own cars. He also backs into parking spots in parking lots, because UPS has data showing that parking lot collisions

    • ... The Voice of Authority.

      We learn it from our parents, our priests and our teachers. At the start of life, adults have more experience than us and thus, know the answers. School is very much a 'if you have this problem, use this answer' rote-learning (and ignoring the problems of sex, drugs, civics/history and finance). We are conditioned to assume that someone telling us the answer has more experience than us. It's why Donald Trump was elected, his celebrity status made him learned. (Learned about being a celebrity but his ad

    • And there's no cell coverage there.

      Google Maps has offline functionality. If you don't tell it not to it will store tracks which will get synced and analyzed later. Google therefore can know how long it will take users to get between points in the road network in real world terms even when there is no cellular coverage, if users are using it for navigation. When you create offline maps with Google they contain enough POI information that you can still find stuff, and they also have enough map data that you can do navigation with no internet

  • Am I the only one (Score:4, Informative)

    by caseih ( 160668 ) on Saturday November 25, 2023 @12:37PM (#64030891)

    Am I the only one who checks the entire route on Google Maps before I jump in my car and go on a trip like that? I like to familiarize myself with the route and have a general idea of the direction, roads, turns, etc. I even pull up street view sometimes to have a look at certain things like intersections.

    And of course have a paper road map (either printed off google, or a real map) in the car.

    It's not like these guys were just trying to find an address in an unfamiliar neighborhood. This was a major road trip they were on. The moment the road turned to a gravel trail they should have turned around. If I were one of those drivers I'd be too embarrassed to talk to the media about it.

    • The moment the road turned to a gravel trail they should have turned around.

      Exactly. Their problem is evaluation of road condition for their vehicle. For these people a printed map or getting familiar with the route beforehand would have similarly failed. They would trust that the thin line on the map has to be an ok road (otherwise they wouldn't put them on the map, would they?) and don't care about anything else.

    • Re:Am I the only one (Score:4, Informative)

      by StormReaver ( 59959 ) on Saturday November 25, 2023 @01:17PM (#64030969)

      The moment the road turned to a gravel trail they should have turned around.

      Or even just stopped to look at the map, and notice, "Hey, this is a long way from the correct route! Maybe I should take some time to get back on track."

      Am I the only one who checks the entire route on Google Maps before I jump in my car and go on a trip like that?

      I'll plan my route using Google Maps for every unfamiliar trip. I'll look at the actual satellite view and compare it to what Maps is telling me.

      Apparently, reading a map is a lost skill. It's shocking.

      • by caseih ( 160668 )

        Yes for sure.

        Me too. I even zoom way in to see if the road is a highway, divided highway or freeway, or whatever. We have tons of tools these days, if we would use them.

    • If I were one of those drivers I'd be too embarrassed

      I guess we just don't understand #tiktokLIFE

    • Thinking again about it, I agree with you that preparing the way is a lost ability (I do it myself, though I don't use cars, I prepare my city trips on OSM, and make a quick sketch on paper about the road crossings I need to follow; I expect nobody else is doing this anymore). My friends enter their cars, set their destination on a mobile phone and just listen to instructions. For the people in the story here it's a combination of this absence of preparation, absence of critical mind (excess of trust in the

    • Yes, I too check the whole route before leaving. But paper maps are next to useless if you're in a big, unfamiliar city, and you're approaching a complex interchange that lists only highway numbers that are NOT numbers you may or may not remember from looking at that paper map hours ago. Or if you make a wrong turn, and you want to get back to the highway you were supposed to be on.

    • From what I can tell, you're probably in the minority. The majority of people seem to just assume that whatever navigation software they're using is smart enough to not send them anywhere problematic. It isn't, and that's been shown in the news often enough that they ought to bloody well know better. I'm with you, I check out the route first using not just the map but, if anything looks off, the satellite imagery as well. I spent a lot of years living in Nevada and learned well that even if it's got a state

    • One of the goals of apps like Google Maps is to save time, and the great majority of the they do . I don't carry paper maps anymore because I have online maps that are in general more detailed and more up to date .its also not clear in this case if paper maps showed the road as traversable by standard cars or not.
  • by laughingskeptic ( 1004414 ) on Saturday November 25, 2023 @12:47PM (#64030903)
    The screenshot in the TikTok video doesn't look like Google Maps.

    If Sandy Valley was the closest city and they were trying to head home from Las Vegas at the time I-15 was shutdown due to a dust storm then just about the only way Sandy Valley could be the closest town is if they took 161 off of I-15. So the first 20 minutes of the detour seemed reasonable. Unfortunately there are no real roads south from there to re-connect to I-15. So there may have been a sense of "pot committed". They had invested 20 minutes into this detour and even though the road south looked iffy, the map wouldn't lead them astray -- would it?

    I suspect if the first thing they saw was the road they killed their cars on, they would have immediately turned around. But with the choice coming following a time investment, they made the wrong choice.

    The map database is built from the tracks of cell phones. If enough cell phones on dirt bikes have traveled the same path, then there is a road. The people collecting the map data should also be pulling the accelerometer data. This would make it much easier to see when a road isn't a road.
    • by hawk ( 1151 )

      >If Sandy Valley was the closest city

      wow.

      In all these years, I've never heard "Sandy Valley" and "city" in the same sentence before . . . :)

      While there is a "back way" into Vegas through Sandy Valley, I-15 has to be *insanely* bad, with serious pileups, before it makes any sense.

      hawk

  • I've been down worse roads* on a Series 1 and it's still tip-top condition. Maybe I'm just a Gen-Xer who can map read and drive (and turn back in a very narrow space, when necessary)??

    * yes: sand, mud, snow and rear wheel drive, but I'm not bragging :-P

  • by Khyber ( 864651 ) <techkitsune@gmail.com> on Saturday November 25, 2023 @01:07PM (#64030947) Homepage Journal

    Everyone with a fucking droid phone and an ATV is out in the desert hitting those trails, and Google is thinking they're roads. I've had MULTIPLE times where Google Maps wants me to cut across the fucking desert on a jeep/ATV trail to get from I-40 to I-15. Anyone who knows that specific area east of Barstow knows that it's bad enough with sand that even the actual roads occasionally get closed due to sand washout. To take such a trail in a non-offroading vehicle is almost suicide.

    • It's especially stupid because the phone has an accelerometer. Why can't Google figure out that if the phone is bouncing all over the place every time someone takes that route, it's not a good road to send people down?

    • The only thing I know about that specific area east of Barstow is that it's bat country.

      Don't stop there!

  • by sonoronos ( 610381 ) on Saturday November 25, 2023 @02:13PM (#64031051)

    Google maps has gotten worse over time. First, why does it keep showing me alternate routes that are substantially slower than other routes? Why does it switch my navigation automatically to different routes without my permission? Why does it route me through less direct and slower paths to my destination? You might say that google maps has always been this bad, but I disagree. I have noticed that this has been happening far more often after or around the time of the pandemic, around 2020.

    • by DewDude ( 537374 )

      Because it's attempting to calculate movement based on traffic. If the direct route has a 20 car pile-up..it's not going to be faster than driving around your ass.

  • Did all the trapped drivers get out and dance in a TikTok video? At least turn lemons into lemonade, people!

  • They almost became real life lemmings.
  • Too bad they shut it down, we could have weeded out a bunch of useless meat sacks.
  • So I was checking out the mountain roads coastside of San Jose and see a connecting road from the one I'm on, Hwy 35, to the main one, Hwy 84. I jump on it and after a nice drive the road ends in a U turnabout. I stop and look ahead at an empty field with no sign of any road nor trail. There is one house at the U turn and a nice older lady comes out and walks up to me and asks why I am looking at the field. I explain what the cars GPS says and show her the display. She says that many days she sees M/cycles
  • A bunch of race fans, each of whom is a jerk who assumes he's a superior driver, get led onto a dirt road in the desert. This sounds like the plot from a bad movie.
  • ...At least Google Maps didn't point them straight at a river, I suppose.
  • It's a new digital age Darwin filter. Keep it up.
  • Geez, when it turns to a dirt road or narrows down, turn around, common sense. My worse experience with Google maps is going to Myrtle Beach where it tells you it can save distance by turning off a 4 lane divided highway to a 2 lane road with RR crossings, speed limits reduced to 35 mph. You lose time, never again !
  • But the reality is you're still supposed to check where you're going. I never blindly follow GPS. I always look at the route it wants to send me before I start. I try to know the area at least a little bit before going there.

    We need to stop blaming technology and start blaming users. The users let the GPS send them down the road because they were negligent.

    Technology is a tool, not a replacement. It helps you, it doesn't do things for you.

Technology is dominated by those who manage what they do not understand.

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