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Comment by Pinus | Hacker News Reader

I’m not familiar with modern (or any, for that matter...) car navigation systems. Do they have a big "NO!" button? The ones I have seen seemed very intent on planning one route, and then following that, no matter what. If you could not make a turn because it was blocked by some road works or whatever, the satnav would just keep trying to direct you back to that point. It would have been nice with a big NO/UNABLE button to push to get an alternative route.

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There is actually the opposite problem now with Google Maps, where you'll be traveling happily on a route and it will tell you "we found a route that's 20 seconds faster by taking you down a road you want to avoid, take your eyes off the road to press a button on your phone immediately or else we're swapping you to it!"

And even if you're at a place where you can safely hit the button, it keeps trying to do it over and over again every time you pass a new exit that can take you to the new route it's trying to foist on you.

As far as I can tell there's no way to make it opt-in, configure it so that it only swaps you if it's a big time savings, or turn it off completely. The only suggestion I find online is to turn off mobile data which means that you then lose real-time traffic updates entirely.

I just keep going and tell the GPS to deal with it until it stops chiming at me and finds a new route

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