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Here is our story:
Leg 1: One AutoWeek Tower, downtown Detroit to Devil's Den, Hell, Michigan.
Beginning at our downtown offices, our teams were asked to find their way to Hell, Michigan (a town center consisting of two convenience stores with a wide array of inappropriate novelty items, a gravel parking lot and a Porta-John).
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It was a charming leg, covering a mix of urban expressway, distant suburban wasteland and gentrified countryside with a couple of nice twisty roads, made all the more charming by the fact that not one of the nav systems recognized the destination name.
Complicating things: The road to Hell is under construction. Any and every expressway out of our office was either clogged with orange traffic barricades, or closed. Life lessons, both.
Like the others, the Volvo system did not recognize the destination by name.
car buying online But one team member was familiar enough with the general area that he could at least direct the system to find its way to a point on the map in the same general direction.
Once underway, the Volvo system pointed out a reasonably direct route.
As with all the systems, however, it proved capable of issuing an instruction that sounds precise, such as, "Stay to the left," which proves to be too vague in the real world. In this case, there were expressway exits on both sides ahead.
car buying online Had the Volvo team followed the nav system's instruction-literally-it would have gotten lost. Yes, the system would have directed the car back onto the freeway eventually, but human navigators who induce such impromptu detours are usually not invited to co-pilot more than once.
These electronic navigation systems are not yet able to understand the fuzzy logic of the human brain, which wants to hear, "Stay to the left because you don't want to take the exit on the right. But not all the way to the left which would force you to get off at the wrong exit thereby further complicating your life." Here's a case where an arrow pointing straight ahead beats all the computer-generated voice instructions you can imagine.
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Outside of downtown, the Volvo instructed our team to pick up I-94 west. One of the team members drove that particular stretch of road home from the office every day and knew that if he followed the request he'd be stuck in a construction-caused backup. The team chose to ignore the direction and see how the system reacted.
