TOM UTLEY: What sort of idiot would slavishly follow a satnav for eight hours from London to York?

How I chuckled this week when I saw pictures of that Mercedes-Benz taxi, stuck at a rakish angle on a dirt track in the middle of Saddleworth Moor in North-West England after its driver had been led astray by his satnav.

What sort of idiot, I wondered, would carry on slavishly following his navigation system when it was so clearly leading him the wrong way, into terrain passable only by a lunar exploration vehicle or a tank?

Hardly had I snorted my contempt, however, than I realised that I knew all too well the answer to the question I had just posed.

Oh dear. The shameful truth, as my wife will be annoyingly eager to confirm, is that I’m precisely that sort of idiot myself. 

What’s more, I believe I have an inkling of how that poor taxi driver’s embarrassing plight arose.

This is because I, too, am the proud owner of a Mercedes-Benz — not a top-of-the-range limousine, mind you, but one of those nifty little A-class hatchbacks, which recently overtook rivals to become one of the bestselling cars in the UK.

Flaw

I bought it three years ago, as a retirement gift to myself, and I love it with all my heart. 

It’s a love, I’m sorry to say, that is not altogether shared by Mrs U, who finds the seats uncomfortable and the chassis too low-slung to negotiate London speed-bumps without constantly scraping its bottom. She is also less than impressed by the car’s miraculously sophisticated electronics.

To list just a couple of its amazing features, it can park itself automatically, turning the steering wheel, applying the accelerator and brakes and changing from reverse to first gear without any intervention from the driver. Mrs U has never even tried that.

There’s also an emergency SOS button, which will put you in immediate touch with a helpful Mercedes staffer — as my wife found to her dismay the other day, when our grandson pressed it as she was struggling to fit his car seat (like so many other four-year-olds, that boy just can’t see a button without pushing it).

Perhaps the most pleasing aspect of my Merc, however, is the sheer beauty and clarity of its wide-screen built-in satnav. I’ve never seen a system more brilliantly designed to show the driver exactly which exit he should take from the roundabout, or how far ahead to expect congestion or traffic lights.

Just one little problem, and if you’re anything like Mrs U, you will argue that it’s a pretty serious flaw in a satnav: it doesn’t seem to have the faintest idea of the best way to get from A to B.

Indeed, I have a theory that the whiz-kids who programmed the Mercedes-Benz navigation system were working on maps of the UK smuggled into Germany by the Special Operations Executive during World War II, with a view to misleading a potential Nazi invasion force.

Whatever the truth, I’ve lost count of the number of times over the past three years when I’ve ended up miles from my intended destination, simply because I was foolish enough to follow the Merc satnav’s superbly clear directions.

But for reasons that may not seem entirely coherent to you, I carried on putting my faith in that hopeless system. After all, what was the point of spending a small fortune on a car with a beautifully designed built-in satnav if I paid no attention to its guidance?

It wasn’t until last October, when I drove the family to York for my darling niece Olivia’s wedding, that I finally learned to stop trusting it.

Now, as most of us know very well, the way to get from London to York is to zip up the M1, and you’re practically there.

Certainly, that’s the route I would have taken in the old days, when I had nothing to guide me but the AA road atlas. It was also the way Mrs U urged me to go when we set off for the wedding.

Agonising

But the Merc’s satnav had other ideas, directing me away from the M1 towards A-roads and B-roads, with occasional short-cuts through housing estates.

‘Ignore it,’ said my wife. But I assured her there must be a good reason why it was telling me to avoid the conventional route. The motorway was probably jammed solid with traffic, I said. The Merc’s system was programmed to take these things into account.

To cut an interminable story short, we arrived in York after an exhausting eight-hour drive by the scenic route, having taken in almost every town centre and road works on the way . . . only to learn that other guests who had driven from London, without the benefit of a Mercedes satnav system, had completed the journey in little more than half the time.

To be fair to Mrs U, she spoke not a word of reproof during those agonising eight hours of our ordeal. She just smiled quietly, in that chilling way women have of screaming, without actually emitting a sound: ‘I TOLD YOU SO, YOU BLITHERING IDIOT!’

Enough to say that if the unfortunate taxi-driver was relying on his Merc’s built-in satnav, it doesn’t surprise me in the least that he got stuck in a dirt track on Saddleworth Moor.

All of which brings me to a great mystery: why is it that a mighty car company like Mercedes-Benz, which produces some of the most sophisticated technology in the world, is incapable of producing a satnav that knows the way from A to B?

And why, if its in-house whiz-kids can’t manage it, doesn’t Mercedes simply buy a licence to the necessary software from a firm that knows what it’s doing?

(Before other car companies start feeling smug, I should point out that a friend with a Mitsubishi tells me that his built-in satnav is rubbish, too — not a patch, he says, on apps such as Google, TomTom or Waze.)

Dangerous

But perhaps there’s a deeper mystery behind all this. Why is it, I wonder, that so many people like me, who pride ourselves on having a modicum of common sense, are so ready to put our faith in computers when it should be clear to the meanest intelligence that they’re utterly unworthy of our trust?

I’m thinking of the news, published this week, that eight offenders sentenced in Scotland to life behind bars were allowed temporary release because of a computer glitch which had miscalculated 1,317 risk assessments.

Did nobody think it mighty odd that eight obviously dangerous lifers were being let out on the say-so of an electronic device?

Or take the truly terrible scandal of the Post Office’s wrongful prosecution of more than 700 sub-postmasters and postmistresses, many of whose lives were utterly destroyed after they were falsely accused of theft, false accounting or fraud because of a faulty computer program.

Why, in the name of all that’s sacred, did nobody at the Post Office stop and say: ‘Hang on! It simply defies common sense that so very many of these once-trusted people should be suddenly on the take, all at once. There must be something very wrong with our new software’?

But then again, why did I go on trusting my car’s satnav, after those countless times it had led me astray?

I have no answer to that. I can only say that I’ve finally learned my lesson. Since that grim eight-hour drive to York, I’ve acquired a portable satnav, which I prop on the dashboard of my beloved Merc — and I advise that taxi driver to do the same.

It may not be as beautiful or as clear as the version that came with the car. But as Mrs U will be quick to tell you, with that infuriating I-told-you-so smile of hers, the great thing is it seems to know the way.