Elog satnav.

Those who know me know how much I hate satnavs and what a total waste of time and money they are. I work for a nationwide, actually continent wide company because we have terminals in Canada and Mexico now, anyway the company installed satnavs in our trucks combined with our elogs, obviously free of charge for drivers to use and I thought I would check out how accurate they are… They were useless, even set for trucks at 80,000lbs and 73 feet long they shoed routes along totally useless roads, routes through the center of cities that have an interstate that bypasses them, these routes would make each trip longer by hours. I informed the HQ that it had faults and they immediately enlisted me to train the system by entering every route that needed to be avoided, it’s an easy thing to do, you just change each route you are on to 2D maps, then zoom in on the streets etc you need to avaoid, click on the feedback button and send the information. I soon noticed that each time I did so the routes returned, so the company had a brand new Android screen fitted to my truck and said the new screen should inform the entire system but after weeks of entering each route they just return, so HQ got in touch with Peoplenet which is the elog company who responded by telling us that it does not record such feed back but if they review such feed back at some time in the future they might change those routes.
Yet another reason I think satnavs are a total waste of time :smiley:

Meanwhile, those of us who use proper Satnavs (rather than some sort of satnav add-on to a customised activity logging package, probably based fairly and squarely on Microsnot or Google maps) simply get on with using it - including real-time flagging of unsuitable/forbidden routes…

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Roymondo:
Meanwhile, those of us who use proper Satnavs (rather than some sort of satnav add-on to a customised activity logging package, probably based fairly and squarely on Microsnot or Google maps) simply get on with using it - including real-time flagging of unsuitable/forbidden routes…

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And we don’t live in dark ages like some cave men across the pond
P/s I think some one has had to much July 4th spirit [emoji6][emoji23][emoji23][emoji23]

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The satnavs where i used to work would calculate a truck route to a destination when requested when stopped but after you’d set off if you got off route or had to take a detour then hit re-calculate it would find the shortest route for a car. This was not told to us but i found out the hard way :confused:

Hi Pat, hope you keeping well up there in the north east.
As I run a regular route I don’t really need a sat- nav to find my way around. I check the Google maps on my phone just to get the heads up on accidents or delays, but use a good old fashion map to get around any incidents. The problem is every cars sat-nav redirects them all the same way. So I have to find alternate routes to the sat-navs. Its unbelievable how many of todays drivers cant survive with out modern technology!
As a kid I had the A-Z of London and Birmingham and always plotted a route for my father or one of his drivers who I rode with and learnt from.
Running a regular schedule suits me, and a mate runs 15 mins ahead of me north bound, and I run 15mins ahead of him southbound so a quick phone call helps keep us out of trouble most of the time. Occasionally an old hand will call out on the CB, which helps out too.
Every now and then I’ll watch a vlogger from the U.K. on Youtube and they seem to rely on their sat-nav, could you imagine them over here?
Take it easy.

I agree Paul, I don’t use a satnav myself because I don’t need it, as I said I was just testing the thing, those who need a satnav to get around should not be driving trucks LOL.
I have driven across the UK, Europe and every one of the lower 48 states, never got lost an didn’t need any satnav, I am not some caveman who lives across the pond, I know what I am doing unlike those who can’t do the job without one, the satnav I was talking about is supplied free of charge, I have a satnav on my phone if I were to need one, which is accurate but being a real driver I don’t need it :smiley: :smiley: :smiley:

hi pat hope u well m8 wonder how the modern super trucker would of got on heading into milan.madrid.naples.athens.cassablanca.etc etc no phone no useless dispatcher giving advice .and i like u am no frail doddering old [zb] im proud to say when i moved here in 2005 i never used a [zb] nav within 6mths of driving for the best company around here sadly no longer going i ran all 48 lower usa without one or ringing office a jibbering wreck lol .iwas taught by a proff my uncle who ran middle east 4yrs . i endedup buying one of a skint brit one weekend in milton ont to me there just a mileage calculator anyway must get back to my abacus :smiley: stay well northants boy

Got to love super truckers that moan about satnavs.
A satnav and map books are only as good as the fool using them.

It’s good to hear from Steve, I was going though some Facebook photo’s the other day and saw the one of you and me at the TA in Columbia NJ, We miss drivers like you may friend.

As for the company fitted satnav. On Tuesday this week I pulled a tanker from NYC to Ayer MA to deliver sucrose to Pepsi and had no idea where exactly in Ayer the plant was, when getting close I hit the GOS tab and the thing guided me exactly to the door, but when I left and had to go to the Worcester terminal U hit the tab again and laughed as it kept telling me to use ridiculous routes to a place I knew :smiley: :smiley: :smiley: :smiley:

ye gd one pat :smiley: just had exactly same to me on last trip downtown san diego but been to customer last year iwas doing like u just to see how gd it was glad to see u still rockin/rollin stay well m8 :slight_smile:

I was listening to a program on BBC radio 4 last week called ‘50 things that changed the world’ and the guy was saying that SAT NAV relies on just 24 satelites and it would only take a small meteor hit to take out the whole system and render such devices useless.
Our wonderful company provided navigation system is totally pointless for most routes and I have also tried comparing it with the system on my iPhone on my most common route it sends trucks miles off route, in fact one of our drivers gran out of time recently because she didn’t get to her destination on time, the sat nav sent her through two cities and sent her right past the main route in Vermont because of a height restriction on the navigation system, the limit shown was 14’6" which is ridiculous because the natiowide limit is 13’9" and our trucks are only 12’6" high :smiley: :smiley: