yer think maybe she missed her turn !! she was darn lucky to get out , was raining foggy & late @ night so I imagine there was no one around there to help her !!
Just sayin thats all, wonder if she just missed her turn in the fog by about 50ft & drove down into the boat ramp by mistake or if her gsp actually did give her the wrong directions . No doubt the OPP will be checking that out & if so would be notifying the manufacturer
Given that the claim is that the conditions were so appalling being raining, dark and heavy fog, one would have to question how fast they should of been driving, one should always drive to the conditions.
The car ended up 30 meters or 100 feet in the water, so one was obviously wasnt for driving at slowly, despite just making a turn,
As for GPS navigation, here in Australia we had a major problem when Apple Navigate was telling people to turn off the main road to get to their destination,this was in the middle of the outback, day time temperatures often get to 130F or 50c the problem being the road it told them to take turned into a goat trail after about 40Km, many people had to be rescued because their cars got stuck and many more ran out of fuel when the had to add another 80km or 50 miles to their destination.
Out their fuel stations can be 300 to 400km apart
That was one of the many problems that forced Apple to dump their own navigation app and start using google maps.
Im not sure why one would turn off a tarmac road onto a dirt road to get to a major city, they just blindly followed the GPS
That given Im really bad at on water navigation, but I know my chart plotter will point me in the right direction and is accurate to within a few feet
Something similar happened near here recently with tragic results. Some fishermen spotted the car in the morning but didn't report it until hours later.
This all started with the cell phones and the hand held GPS units designed for hikers and walkers.
Tom Tom and all the old stand alone units use an address - you need to give the thing and address - and then it plots a course to the address using streets and roads. Most of those units can't navigate in a parking lot.
There has been a new phenomenon with Google Maps and GPS - people look at the launch ramp on Google satellite view because they want to know what it looks like - and they drop a pin there ON THE RAMP.
Then - when they tell their phone to drive them there it does exactly what it was told - it drives the person right ONTO THE RAMP (and into the water).
This is happening a lot because the cell phones will drive right though parking lots and over dirt roads and even down launch ramps.
If you tell your cell phone to navigate you onto the launch ramp that's exactly what it's going to do. (We use this feature all the time to find trail heads and geo cashes).
three probable reasons:
1. she selected the dockage instead of parking option (common mistake)
2. going underwater was the most direct route
3. Her GPS view was zoomed out to the point that Lake Huron looked like a small puddle compared to the size of the car symbol on her screen.
One of the UK sailing magazines did an article about this. They were using a chartplotter with layers, and the layer that they were using did not include the reef. It pays to have both a digital and analog frame of reference for your passage planning!
