No no, not a digital re-mastering of the debut album from Eric Clapton's post-Cream super-group.
But this link tells the story of someone who has put way too much faith in new automotive technology.
Or so he claims...
Turns out a delivery truck driver ran under a railway overpass on a country road just north of London - and sheared the top off his truck.
"The GPS made me do it," the hapless but uninjured driver claimed, in so many words.
Um, buddy - GPS is like a digital road map. Road maps don't tell you how tall the bridges are.
Neither does GPS.
That's what those yellow signs on the bridges and overpasses are for.
And that's what your eyes are for.
It's the latest in a series of dumb-butt crashes which drivers have tried to blame on GPS.
There was a report of a guy in Scotland who, in response to a request from 'Doris of the Dashboard' as my Motoring 2012 colleague Graeme Fletcher calls that disembodied voice to "Please turn left now", did so - and drove off a cliff.
Others have mistaken a bright blue line on a background of lighter blue on the GPS map as a bridge, when in fact it was a ferry boat crossing.
NOT the time to literally 'miss the boat'...
I myself have been directed by GPS towards a one-way street - going the wrong way.
("But officer; I was only going one way."
"Didn't you see the arrows?"
"I didn't even see the Indians...")
By strange co-incidence, I happened to be channel-surfing last night here in beautiful downtown Vancouver (no riots were scheduled...) and as I flipped past the 'Speed' channel, there was an ad for one of their TV shows - can't remember the name of it - which apparently shows real-life car crashes. It was a series of those brain-fryingly-rapid tenth-of-a-second clips that surely generate a wide variety of mental illnesses among viewers - one of the clips was of a delivery truck having its top sheared off as the dude drove under an overpass.
Surely, nobody had a camera on that country road north of London. Which can only mean this isn't the first time this has happened.
Darwin Awards, anyone?
GPS is a modern marvel. Think about the computer processing that's going on in there. Make a wrong turn, and in a second or two, the system has re-scanned its digital maps, figured out where you are versus where you've said you want to go, and come up with an alternative plan.
Usually accompanied by those fateful words from DotD in that impossibly gorgeous British accent: "If possible, please make a legal U-turn."
Memo to all drivers, not just delivery truck drivers in rural southern Ontario: This does NOT mean doing a handbrake turn in the middle of a busy highway at rush hour...
Heck, my GPS can't even read its own shorthand. Even after updating it, the thing still says stuff like "Take exit on right to H W Y four hundred and three." Never mind things like "Gardiner Expy W"
Posted by: Brian | July 29, 2011 at 05:13 PM