If you’ve been following along, you might be thinking twice about renting a car in Europe. I hope that’s not the case. Cruising around Europe in a rental car is a great experience. On this trip, it was just the three of us – me, my Better Half, and the GPS Lady.
I consider myself to be a relatively calm, mild-mannered guy, unaccustomed to long-winded rants. That being said, admittedly, I’ve been on a bit of a rant about our rental car.
The thing I’ve recently learned about rants, though, is that once you get started, it’s kinda hard to stop. So now that I have some momentum, why not keep it going? I’m not finished with this car yet!
Je n’ai Pas Encore Fini!
Allow me to tell you about the car’s GPS system. I’ll start with the positive – the voice was nice. She spoke like a proper English lady with a pleasing tone. Pleasant to listen to. Firm, but pleasant. And oh so polished.
My first issue with the car’s GPS system has to do with its user-unfriendly interface. Entering a destination was a pain. How hard could it be, you might ask? Hard. Even after you know how it works.
Destinations could be entered either by using a pictorial keyboard on a screen, or by turning a dial on the console to specify letters and numbers. Either way was equally troublesome.
The name of the destination had to be just so: country, city, street, number, in that order. On the first few days of our trip, we crossed the border between Spain and France quite a few times.
You might be surprised at how long it takes one to get used to starting with COUNTRY when entering a new destination. And of course, once I’d been trained, we no longer had to make border crossings.
She Had Good Intentions
As if I hadn’t been messing it up enough on my own, the GPS Lady tried to help, which only made things worse. As I entered letters and numbers, she’d guess the destination and fill in the remaining blanks. She guessed wrong almost every time.
If I didn’t notice that the GPS Lady was finishing the destination for me, I’d keep entering digits. Now we’ve got a real mess. Time to start over. Remember – “Country” first.
I got used to her guessing game, but entering the destination was still tricky. When we wanted to go to St. Paul de Vence. I entered it, (starting with “France”). The GPS Lady didn’t recognize it.
Maybe she wants “Saint Paul de Vence.” Nope. OK. Maybe I made a typo the first time. Retyped it. Nope. The GPS lady would only take us to “Vence, St. Paul de.” She was a fussy one, alright.
Kind of a Slow Learner
Once she had the destination, the GPS lady did pretty well most of the time. But she couldn’t recognize when a street had been temporarily blocked off. This is bad when you’re lost in the labyrinth of an ancient city center.
She took us round and round to the same dead end, even if I approached it from different directions. She couldn’t figure out that we weren’t going that way for a reason. An improvement here might be a good application of artificial intelligence.
Yes, the GPS lady was a slow learner. Slow, but insistent. When we decided to NOT stop at a destination, the GPS lady kept telling us how to get back to where we no longer wanted to go. It was days before I figured out how to turn her off.
Not only that – I couldn’t turn her volume down. We could turn the radio volume up or down, but not the GPS lady. I tried adjusting the volume while she was talking. I tried everything. No luck.
There HAD to be a way to make her be quiet. I finally found the hidden button. Ahhhhhhhh.
So in sum, we weren’t crazy in love with the car’s GPS system.
To be continued…
