UK a nation of sat nav addicts: report

The Gadget Show  Friday 11 March 2011

Are we too reliant on our GPS devices?

A new report from the Royal Academy of Engineering has labelled UK drivers as “dangerously dependent” on satellite navigation.

A combination of the spread of GPS tech into all kinds of devices and ever-more attractive prices has made some kind of digital navigation an almost essential part of our daily driving routine. But according to the Academy’s Dr Martyn Thomas, we could be in for a shock.

“The UK is already dangerously dependent on GPS,” Dr Thomas says. “GPS and other navigation systems are so useful and so cheap to build into equipment that we have become almost blindly reliant on the data they give us.”

“A significant failure of GPS could cause lots of services to fail at the same time, including many that are thought to be completely independent of each other.”

Bob Cockshott of the Digital Systems Knowledge Transfer Network, who helped launch the report, also raised the issue of a whole generation of road users that have learned to drive depending on sat navs, and who as a result cannot read maps.

He went on: “dependency on GPS is growing and jammers are getting easier to obtain. We expect this problem to become more severe.”