SatNav leads to Crackpot cliff
By: Drivers.com staff
Date: 2006-04-10
"They must have all got sat-navs for Christmas," said one local resident about the unexpected stream of traffic that began arriving on a right-of-way track near the tiny hamlet of Crackpot in the Yorkshire Dales district of northern UK.
Normally only used by locals such as game keepers and the occasional mountain biker, the unclassified road is believed to have been built by the Romans and historically used by horses and carts. It has steep inclines and, in one part, runs perilously close to a 100 foot drop.
For modern traffic it is reckoned to be only suitable for 4 X 4s. However, it appears the track was being fed to satellite traffic navigation systems and was leading delivery vans, sales people and even minibuses into difficulty from which they often had to be extracted by local farm tractors.
Other incidents and nav updates
The Crackpot story is just one of a number that have been appearing in the UK media recently due to the rapidly increasing use of in-car navigation technology. (See Navigation Mystery Tours)
In a recent press release, Trafficmaster, a leading supplier of intelligent vehicle navigation and tracking solutions, says that its SmartNav navigaton system is "the only satellite navigation system that can remotely update its mapping for existing customers" in order to keep them on the right track."
"Smartnav's mapping data is stored in central computers outside the vehicle," TrafficMaster says. This means that user feedback can enable the maps the system uses to be regularly updated. "All SmartNav customers automatically benefit from the very latest mapping data," the company says.
Trafficmaster Plc was founded in 1988. It operates in North America under the Teletrac brand name.
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