Australian police in the southeast state of Victoria have had to rescue a number of motorists who have become stuck, for as long as 24 hours in some cases, after following directions from their Apple iPhone mapping software.
Police Inspector Simon Clemence told Reuters that the motorists were all looking for the tourist town of Mildura, which is over 40 miles away from where they all ended up, which was in the snake infested Murray Sunset National Park, “We had a chap trapped in there just this Friday night, after his car became bogged down. He saw a snake, a goat and a fox and was too scared to get out of his car (must have been a pomme),” explained Inspector Clemence.
The Murray Sunset National Park, although very beautiful, is in a largely uninhabited and rather arid region of the far northwest of Victoria, and anyone who knows the area at all would not even attempt to enter or cross it without a full 4×4 capability vehicle. And, whilst this is all rather amusing, it should be remembered that once in there and stuck, the daytime temperature will be well over 40 degrees (they recently had a 46C day and that’s 115F in old money!). Oh, and you are also out of mobile telephone range. Heading for a nice cold beer in a plush resort, you’re not likely to have food and water on board… so one can understand the dangers.
To be fair, Apple acted quickly to rectify the problem by correcting the location of Mildura on their system, however, the problem still persisted for those people seeking directions from Melbourne city and Apple took the unusual measure of advising customers to use rival Google Mapping in the area until they had sorted out the problems.
Meanwhile, the police say that drivers should not rely entirely on technology to direct them and whilst they acknowledge it is difficult when traveling over 300km on one road with no signposts when you are suddenly told by your GPS to ‘turn,’ they suggest that if the instruction really doesn’t feel right… it probably isn’t.
As a footnote, Apple sacked the executive who was responsible for the mapping software and put Jonathan Ive in charge of the system. For those of you not familiar with Mr. Ive, he is their industrial design genius and generally clever bloke.