By our Motoring Correspondent, Kobus Liebenberg
The Motoring Desk presents a practical guide to asserting yourself against a device that has never once driven through Somerset West and does not know about the roadworks on Van Riebeeck Street
Let me be clear about something before we begin.
I am not lost. I have never been lost. I grew up in this area, I know these roads, and I have been navigating the Helderberg without electronic assistance since before the people who designed GPS satellites had finished school. The fact that I occasionally arrive at a destination later than expected, or from an unexpected direction, or having briefly visited a cul-de-sac in Broadlands that I did not intend to visit, is entirely unrelated to navigation and is more properly understood as scenic flexibility.
The GPS does not see it this way.
The GPS has opinions. It expresses them in a calm, measured tone that my wife has noted is considerably calmer than the tone I use when I disagree with the GPS, a comparison I reject on the grounds that the GPS has never been cut off at the Lourens Street circle by a Fortuner.
What follows is a practical guide to holding your own.
RULE ONE: ESTABLISH DOMINANCE EARLY
The GPS will attempt, from the moment you enter your destination, to set the terms of the relationship. It will calculate a route. It will announce this route in a tone that implies the route is settled, final and not open to further discussion.
Do not accept this framing.
Before you move, study the proposed route. You will likely notice immediately that the GPS intends to take you down a road that you know perfectly well has had a water main problem since February, or past the school at exactly the wrong time, or via that robot near the Spar that has been on red for four minutes at a stretch since they adjusted the timing last year.
Point this out, out loud, to the GPS. It will not respond. This is fine. The point is not to change the GPS’s mind at this stage. The point is to establish, for the record, that you are aware of the situation and are not simply following instructions.
You are a driver. You have context. The GPS has satellites.
Context beats satellites.
RULE TWO: THE SHORTCUT
At some point, you will take a shortcut. This is inevitable. The shortcut will be a road the GPS does not prefer, possibly because it is not on the GPS’s map at the level of granularity it respects, or possibly because the GPS simply has a philosophical commitment to the main road that it has never explained.
The GPS will respond to your shortcut with its most powerful weapon: silence followed by recalculation.
The recalculation is the GPS’s way of saying: fine. I see what you’re doing. I am not going to argue with you about it. I am simply going to absorb your decision and produce a new route that gets you where you’re going, thereby demonstrating that I am bigger than this.
The recalculation is very difficult to argue with. It is, tactically speaking, the high road.
What you must do at this point is arrive via the shortcut noticeably faster than the original route would have taken. This does not always happen. Sometimes the shortcut has a tractor on it. Sometimes the road that was always a shortcut has been quietly requalified as a private access road and there is a gate. These outcomes must be absorbed with dignity. Do not let the GPS see that you are unsettled. It will only recalculate.
RULE THREE: THE U-TURN INSTRUCTION
There will come a moment — and it always comes — when the GPS says: “When possible, make a U-turn.”
This instruction is never issued neutrally. It is issued in the calm voice of a device that knows exactly what you did and has decided not to make a scene about it, which is in some ways worse than if it made a scene.
“When possible, make a U-turn” means: you have gone wrong. I told you. I told you twice. I told you with a small chime that you chose to interpret as optional. And now here we are.
The correct response is to not make a U-turn. Not immediately. Give it a moment. Continue in the current direction for long enough to suggest that the failure to U-turn was a choice, not a submission, and that you are making the U-turn now because you have independently concluded that it is appropriate.
The GPS does not know the difference between a U-turn made under instruction and a U-turn made on your own initiative. This is important. You must know the difference, even if the GPS doesn’t, because this is fundamentally a matter of self-respect.
RULE FOUR: THE VOICE
The choice of GPS voice is more consequential than is generally acknowledged.
The default voice is a woman who is pleasant, patient and completely unbothered by anything you do. She will mispronounce Helderberg. She will mispronounce Somerset West in a way that suggests she has heard of Somerset but is improvising the rest. She will, under no circumstances, mispronounce the destination in a way that sounds like she doubts you should be going there, but the effect is similar.
Some people switch to a male voice on the theory that a male voice is easier to argue with. We have tried this. The male voice is, if anything, worse — it has a faint air of reasonableness that implies it could handle any objection you raise, calmly and at length, which removes the satisfaction of objecting.
Others use a novelty voice: a celebrity, a character, a regional accent. We cannot recommend these. It is difficult to maintain a principled disagreement with someone who speaks in the voice of a cartoon.
The best approach is to leave the default voice on and simply address it by a name of your choosing. Something that restores the power dynamic. We use Gerald. Gerald sounds like a man whose advice you can take or leave.
“Gerald,” we say, as we take the road to Faure instead of the road Gerald has proposed, “I know what I’m doing.”
Gerald recalculates. He always recalculates.
But he does it on our terms.
RULE FIVE: ARRIVAL
When you arrive at your destination — which you will, because the GPS is in the end a collaborative device despite everything — the GPS will say: “You have arrived at your destination.”
It will say this without ceremony, without acknowledgement of the journey, without any recognition of the decisions made, the shortcuts attempted, the U-turn that was eventually performed with dignity intact.
“You have arrived at your destination.”
As if it was ever in doubt.
At this point, some drivers feel the urge to say something. To acknowledge the argument, clarify the result, establish for the record who was right about the Van Riebeeck Street roadworks.
We advise against this. Winning an argument with a GPS is not about the final word. It is about the relationship: the quiet, ongoing negotiation between a device that knows the optimal route and a person who knows this town, these roads, these school-run times and the specific behaviour of the robot near the Spar.
The GPS will always recalculate. That is its nature and, honestly, its virtue.
You will always take the shortcut. That is yours.
Between these two truths, somehow, everyone gets home.
add a foot note about re-calculating the re-calculated route etc,
A note on recalculation: It has been brought to our attention by a reader in Strand that the GPS argument does not always end at the U-turn. There exists, she reports, an advanced stage of the conflict in which the driver disputes not only the original route but the recalculated route, takes a second independent deviation, receives a second recalculation, disputes that one as well and continues in this fashion through three, four or in one documented case seven successive recalculations, arriving at the destination via a route that neither the driver nor the GPS had originally considered and that neither party is able to fully account for. The GPS, to its credit, recalculates every time without complaint, without raised voice and without any detectable change in disposition. The driver, by the seventh recalculation, is a different person than they were when they left the house. Gerald, through all of it, remains Gerald. We find this either admirable or deeply unsettling and have not yet decided which.
The Helderburger Motoring Desk wishes to note that Meneer Swanepoel does not own a GPS, has never owned a GPS and navigates entirely from memory, a 1994 road map he keeps in the cubbyhole and what he describes as “a feel for the road.” He has been late to two appointments in thirty years. He considers this an acceptable record and we are not in a position to disagree.
Corrections: A previous column referred to the Somerset West road between two landmarks as having “a speed limit that changes based on factors not officially communicated.” The municipality wrote to clarify that the factors have been officially communicated, in a notice posted on a board at the municipal offices in 2019. We regret that we missed this. We note that several other motorists appear to have missed it as well.
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