Rental Car GPS Leads to Nightmare Vacation
Perhaps the funniest part of this article is the presence of gooogle ads for GPS systems at the top of the page.
Nevertheless...
What happened to this couple would be frightening. I found myself one evening in the middle of one of the worst parts of the Oakland CA area. I was wearing a tie and wrestling with one of those folding maps while driving an obvious rental car. I was careful not to make eye contact with too many people there. But the fuuny thing is, I did not know the peril I was in until I noticed the look on the faces of some SF residents I was relaying the story to.
Moving on, one of the most misunderstood aspects of GPS is that the accuracy of your read-out has more to so with the accuracy of the underlying map than it has with the GPS system itself. So what strikes me about this article is that Avis must have accepted maps possibly without confirming their accuracy. I would imagine that Avis does not want to get into the business of cartography to make their own. It isn't easy, and its very expensive.
In our new world of businesses having to rely on the services of others in an interpretable supply chain network. Trusting one company means you are implicitly trusting their partners. For branding reasons, these partners are often not disclosed.
Here is the story.
http://www.aunty-spam.com/rental-car-gps-leads-to-nightmare-vacation/
Nevertheless...
What happened to this couple would be frightening. I found myself one evening in the middle of one of the worst parts of the Oakland CA area. I was wearing a tie and wrestling with one of those folding maps while driving an obvious rental car. I was careful not to make eye contact with too many people there. But the fuuny thing is, I did not know the peril I was in until I noticed the look on the faces of some SF residents I was relaying the story to.
Moving on, one of the most misunderstood aspects of GPS is that the accuracy of your read-out has more to so with the accuracy of the underlying map than it has with the GPS system itself. So what strikes me about this article is that Avis must have accepted maps possibly without confirming their accuracy. I would imagine that Avis does not want to get into the business of cartography to make their own. It isn't easy, and its very expensive.
In our new world of businesses having to rely on the services of others in an interpretable supply chain network. Trusting one company means you are implicitly trusting their partners. For branding reasons, these partners are often not disclosed.
Here is the story.
http://www.aunty-spam.com/rental-car-gps-leads-to-nightmare-vacation/
