Satnav makes car trips shorter and safer

Cynics often dismiss in-car satellite navigation (satnav) systems as an expensive luxury bought by people with no sense of direction.

But new research suggests that drivers using in-car satnav systems not only take less time to reach their destination, they may drive more safely, too.

Engineers Wen-Chen Lee and Bor-Wen Cheng of the National Yunlin University of Science & Technology in Taiwan paid 16 drivers to use in-car satellite navigation systems in order to reach a variety of urban and rural destinations they had never travelled to before. They hired another 16 motorists who were asked to use paper maps to reach a similar set of mysterious destinations.

The team found that the satnav-assisted journeys were around 7% shorter in towns than map-guided ones, and 2% shorter on rural runs.

"Using a navigation system saves time and gasoline when driving in unfamiliar regions, especially in an urban environment," Lee says in a paper to be published in a forthcoming edition of the road safety journal Accident Analysis and Prevention.