It’s true — blindly following your car’s GPS can be deadly
Many grisly rumours are stupid, but ill-fated GPS routing tales are too true
We’ve all heard the rumours: Those baby-on-board signs were invented after a baby died; if you paste stick-figure families on your minivan, your real family will be in danger; blindly follow your GPS and you will die. Our most persistent rumours, while headline grabbing, aren’t always what they seem.
Those baby on board signs? They’ve been around since a company called Safety 1st started manufacturing them in 1984. There have been many incarnations of how they came to be, but most involve the grisly death of a child. Somewhere, the story goes, first responders weren’t aware that an infant was in a crashed vehicle. The infant was thrown clear and overlooked in a snow bank/missed in foliage/found frozen under a seat, depending on the source. The signs were to let those coming upon a crash site know to look for a child, and parents would not display the sign if babies weren’t on board.
Except, there was never a dead child. Safety 1st made all kinds of baby accessories, but it was those ubiquitous yellow signs that made history. They sold 10,000 signs the first month; within nine months that figure climbed to 500,000. They helped Safety 1st to eventually crack overall sales of $158-million and be bought out by the segment giant, Dorel.
The company thought they would encourage those seeing the sign to drive more carefully; mostly, they inspired signs with responses like “It’s your kid, you be careful.” Ironically, it was those very parents thinking they were protecting their kids who screwed up the usefulness of the signs, by leaving them posted whether a child was in the car or not — and sometimes the “baby” in question was 10 years old.
The arrival of stick figure families, seemingly standard equipment on minivans everywhere, launched a new accessory to hate. First introduced on a large scale in 2006 by Woodland Manufacturing in Boise, Idaho, the proud declarations of fertility and how many extracurricular activities you could afford for your kids bloomed overnight. An Australian couple launched My Family TM at the same time.
Both claim to be first in a field now overrun with copycats and variations — zombie families, a woman with eight cats, families abducted by aliens. You can get custom work done at varying prices, and My Family has recently introduced a Canadian addition: Chardonnay Mom.
They’d be pretty innocuous except for the required rumour that started last year. News organizations — real ones — started reporting those stickers could be setting you up for a home invasion or a kidnapping.
A rescue group in Ohio published a warning on Facebook that tugged apart all the information contained on your rear windshield. From having a dog too small to attack, a kid at football practice and Dad away at war, all ways to make parents more paranoid. Let’s face it, any “Bad People” stalking stick-figure families are probably more Home Alone bandits than criminal masterminds.
Unfortunately, navigation systems — based on Global Positioning Systems (GPS) — leading to people to their deaths is no myth. Reports worldwide confirm the systems are not fail-safe, and drivers inexperienced in either the system’s operation or their surroundings — and frequently both — have paid with their lives.
Just a few weeks ago, a Chicago woman, Zohra Hussain, died when her husband, while following GPS instructions, attempted to cross a bridge that had been closed since 2009. Hussain died of burns after an 11-metre plunge. Boat launches and bridge abutments are frequent problems; in 2011 three women in Washington State ended up in a submerged SUV when they blindly followed the GPS in their rental. They escaped injury.
In 2012, three Japanese tourists in Australia had to abandon a car on a road that got progressively muddier; the GPS hadn’t warned them the road would be under water at high tide, and they scrambled to get out as it floated away.
Less random, and occurring with more frequency in California, is something rangers in Death Valley National Park have called Death by GPS.
In 2009, Alicia Sanchez was found near death by a ranger, her young son dead in her Jeep. Lost for five days in the unforgiving temperatures that can climb over 46 C in summer months, she’d followed GPS instructions off established roads and deeper into uncharted territory.
Although the national park has been posting more warnings for visitors — including that cellphone reception is extremely limited — many satellite systems are still recognizing bypasses that have been closed for decades as roads and many drivers are still blindly following their technology into trouble.
Navigational systems are a tool. Tools are only as good as the people using them, and many of the sad accounts you hear, feature people ignoring barricades and other physical warnings. From people plucked from the edge of cliffs to those trapped by rising seas, paying more attention to the view out the windshield than a screen on the dash should have been warning enough. Those tragedies aren’t rumours.
Oh, and one rumour that needs to be stomped out forever: the Chevy Nova was never misnamed. Nova does not translate into “doesn’t go” in Spanish, and the car did well in the Spanishlanguage countries where it was sold.