Sat Navs are Easy Pickings

Sat Nav

Many companies with fleet vehicles are insisting that their drivers make a conscious effort to remove all valuables from view when parking to help lower the number of fleet insurance claims they have to make, which in turn may help to lower their insurance premiums.

Cunning opportunist thieves are also wising up to the fact that most people put their Sat Nav out of sight in the glove box! Thieves are now not simply looking for valuables left inside a car but are consciously targeting vehicles which have the tell tale signs that a Sat Nav is used by looking for the circular mark left on the windscreen and breaking into the vehicles to search the glove box to find the equipment, easy pickings for those who leave a mark on their screens.

What is even more frightening is that the thieves are not just selling the Sav Nav to make a fast buck, but are turning them on and using the ‘take me home’ option to let their ‘colleagues’ know that there is an potentially empty house waiting to be burgled. Scary stuff, not only is your car damaged but your home ransacked all in the same day.

A word of advice, remove the mark from your screen with a tissue, making sure you don’t just leave a smudgy mark before you walk away from your vehicle, lock the glove box or take the Sat Nav with you and remove the ‘take me home’ or last destination option from your equipment. All a bit of a pain to do I know, but for the few moments it takes it is well worth it.

Another SatNav Blunder?

Once again making the UK news is the chaos being caused to roads and railways in the South East and Outer London area as yet another Heavy Goods Vehicle (HGV) manages to hit a railway bridge!

It never fails to amaze that despite all bridges which span the roads in the UK having glaring height stickers that HGV’s either hit them or get stuck underneath! One can only assume that the HGV driver was be guided by his/her SatNav along a road with a low bridge. He or she cannot be local or used to travelling along the road or they would know that there is insufficient height, or am I just being a bit naïve here? Do HGV drivers somehow think their lorry is going to become lower just so that they can squeeze underneath on a particular given day!

Road and rail passengers will face yet another day of disruption to the start their schedules. Let’s just hope that the HGV insurance covers such incidents, the cost of structural repair to the bridge has the possibility of running into thousands of pounds, as specialist engineers will carry out surveys to ensure safe rail travel and the stability of the bridge.

All in all, if it is yet another SatNav problem then surely the HGV drivers really ought to look and take notice of the signs, after all they are put there for a reason, which is of course to prevent incidents such as these occurring, before SatNavs the signs were they only way the drivers would be able to tell if the road was suitable or not! Maybe the drivers are relying far to heavily on their SatNavs rather than intuition and common sense!