Canada Recap - the cars

I had a lot of problems with the cars and the various GPSs. They didn’t know where places were. This is fundamental - that’s why you have one.

The first car had an inbuilt GPS. At first, it was telling me my speed in kmh, while telling me the speed limit in mph! I tried to find a setting, but couldn’t. One night, it wanted to apply an update, and they were both suddenly in kmh the next day. The very first time, I asked it to take me to a supermarket. It gave me several choices, but when I got to the chosen location, no supermarket existed anywhere nearby. There was one two streets away. On several occasions, I gave it an address, and we didn’t end up where we should have.

The next was slightly better.

Then I had a free standing GPS in Quebec. I couldn’t enter an address more than 20kms away. It didn’t know where to find towns. There are an enormous number of saints in town names and street names in Quebec, and they were only in the GPS as abbreviated forms - not consistently abbreviated either. And part of Quebec has a habit of calling towns x(y) where x was originally the major town in the area (which can be 100km away), and y is the actual town name. Woe betide you if you want to go to x - the GPS will try to take you to some x(y) - possibly in the opposite direction.

When I got to Montreal, there were roadworks. I had already noticed that they seemed to be replacing the sewers everywhere in the city, which meant there were a lot of road closures. So I changed my drop off from the city to the airport. This was good, but I should probably have changed my entire location. Montreal is also (from the point of view of someone who has only driven there for a few hours) replacing every overhead freeway and flyover. The GPS knew nothing about this, but, since I was going to the airport there were road signs. The GPS was ok with me driving where there was no road, but the three times I was going along a road in the wrong direction (according to it) it had a hernia, turned red, and yelled at me repeatedly. The only reason I left it on was in case I got lost. Several times, I thought this was about to happen.

I will definitely take my GPS with me next time. Or work out how to use google maps as a GPS, because I think everyone is doing that now, so the maps on GPSs are probably getting worse and worse, because they simply don’t have the customer base to make updates worthwhile.

I had reversing cameras in all the cars, and they were good. The first car had automatic windscreen wipers, which I could do without.