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Satnav challenge 1: the country drive

Posted on 20 Jul 2010 at 17:10

Route: Cobham Lodge, 46 Portsmouth Road, Cobham, Surrey KT11 1HY to the Parrott Inn, Ockley Road, Dorking, Surrey RH5 5RZ

The first challenge of the day took us from the glamorous surroundings of the Cobham Lodge hotel car park in Surrey to the Parrott Inn, a country pub in Dorking, about 14 miles away.

Yet, before we’d even punched a postcode into the satnavs, things had started to go wrong. Sarah collected a puncture, reducing the speed of her 1.2-litre Renault Clio from jogging to walking pace. Meanwhile, map man Tim excelled himself by managing to get lost on the motorway on his way to the hotel, which didn’t bode well for his chances of navigating the winding country roads on the way to the Parrott Inn. So, an hour later than anticipated, challenge organiser Barry dished out the sheets containing the address of our first destination, and we were go, go, go!

CoPilot’s iPhone software takes longer to get going than War and Peace

First out of the car park was reviews editor Jon Bray. Driving a family car the size of a bungalow, and with an Android smartphone suckered to the windscreen with an iffy-looking home-made mount, Jon bashed the pub’s postcode into the Google Maps software and was on his way before Tim had time to find the right page in his atlas. Seconds later, fellow satnav freeloader Priti was hot on Jon’s tail, still muttering under her breath about the tiny screen on the Nokia N97 we’d leant her for the day.

Sarah, meanwhile, had decided to take advantage of one of the flashier features on her top-of-the-range TomTom, and search for the pub name on Google. Alas, she was thwarted by dodgy 3G reception, and after a minute or so of choking on Jon and Priti’s exhaust fumes, decided to punch in the postcode and get going.

Sarah wasn’t the only one having trouble with mobile data. Barry had plotted his route within seconds using the CoPilot maps stored on his iPhone, but attempted to get the upper hand on his rivals by downloading traffic updates before setting off. Yet, if the progress bar was anything to go by, he’d have been better off heading for the nearest six-car pile-up than waiting for traffic data to download, so decided to get going after 90 seconds of dawdling.

Last out of the blocks was Tim, who had failed to find the exact road we were heading for on his A-Z Great Britain Road Atlas, so decided to head in the general direction of Dorking and, optimistically, hope for the best.

Mixed start

Call us rose-tinted fantasists if you will, but surely the point of satnav devices is they point you in the right direction from the get-go? Not CoPilot’s iPhone software. It takes longer to get going than War and Peace. In fact, you have to be travelling at somewhere close to 15mph before it even thinks about spitting out directions. Barry spent the night before the challenge walking around the PC Pro office, convinced his software wasn’t working, because CoPilot simply doesn’t like it if you’re not travelling at a decent clip. It’s the satnav Jeremy Clarkson would have invented.

On leaving the Cobham Lodge car park, Barry’s satnav still wasn’t entirely sure where it was. Only after he’d guessed which road to follow at the first roundabout did CoPilot decide to pull its finger out and start issuing directions, adding an unwanted frisson of pot luck to proceedings.

Jon’s Google Maps was having an altogether different problem with roundabouts: namely, that it decided to call them “traffic circles”, leaving Jon shaking his head at Google’s sloppy localisation but nevertheless making sterling progress.