Unbelievable

My mom is in town, and she brought with her a TomTom GPS navigator thing. It’s about twice the size of an iPhone and cost several hundred dollars. She’s leaving tomorrow, so she asked me to help her program it to direct her to the airport.

The touch screen on this thing is nearly impossible to use, but never mind. After a few tries I figured out how to find the airport in its list of Points of Interest, so I selected it and hit the “Route” button.

A new screen appeared with the legend “Analyzing Roads” and a counter. It analyzed over a hundred thousand roads, or pretended to. I have some idea of what it should have been doing, but it seemed like it was going through a big alphabetical list of every road it knew and crossing them off one by one if they didn’t have an airport or my house on them.

After almost half a minute, it announced the result: No Route Found.

What.

Here’s how you get to the airport from my house: Go to the end of the street and turn left. Take the next left onto the highway. Exit when you see the airport signs.

The TomTom could not figure this out, despite having pinpointed both our location and the airport’s location on its map. And when it said “No route found,” that was all it said. It just sat there, dumb and unapologetic. It wouldn’t even try to give approximate directions, perhaps to a nearby interchange or even just to the destination city.

This was the first and only time in my life that I’ve used a portable satnav. It’s a dedicated device that’s supposed to be good at precisely one thing: giving directions. The task I gave it couldn’t possibly have been simpler, and yet it failed horribly.

If Apple and Google put these GPS guys out of business, it will be their own damn fault.