Sat nav strikes again: UK driver nearly goes off cliff following GPS directions

When your GPS system tells you to drive down an unpaved, three-foot-wide path, perhaps it's time to pull to the side of the road, get your bearings and maybe - just maybe - even ask for directions. But Robert Jones of Doncaster, South Yorkshire in the UK, didn't do that. Instead, he soldiered on, following the sat nav system right up to and over the brink of a cliff.

The vehicle was stopped, and Jones was saved from a nearly certain Darwin Award win by a fortuitously placed wire fence. Had the fence not held long enough for emergency crews to extricate the BMW Jones was driving, it would have plummeted down a 100ft embankment.

Sadly, Jones' incident isn't an isolated one - UK drivers in particular have been driving into trouble at the behest of their GPS systems for years. But that doesn't stop people from putting blind faith in the tools.

"It kept insisting the path was a road, even as it was getting narrower and steeper, so I just trusted it," Jones told the Halifax Evening Courier.

It's unknown what caused the GPS system to malfunction so badly. What caused Jones' malfunction is equally mysterious. Advances like BMW's learning sat nav system (pictured above), previewed in February apparently can't come to market soon enough.