Test driving Dreevo

I’ve always preferred to find my way around using a printed map. I’m not exactly a technophobe, but sometimes it’s less trouble to open a book than mess about trying to program a device. And printed maps give you a bigger picture, so if you miss a turning, you can see whether there’s another one further up the road that will eventually get you back on track, or whether you need to turn round and go back to where you went wrong.

To be honest, getting lost is just something I do. Often. A road might look familiar either because I’m on the home stretch or because it’s the same wrong turn I took yesterday.

So it was with a mixture of enthusiasm and trepidation that I agreed to put the Dreevo GPS device through its paces for a few months. I have to admit that the little gadget has guided me admirably, not only in unfamiliar territory, but also in what is, to me, a foreign country.

I have never used a sat nav device before. Really. Never. So Dreevo’s first outing with me was a baptism of fire. All I knew was that I was somewhere in south London, in rush hour, and needed to get back to Bedfordshire before my kids sent out a search party. There was only one glitch on the entire journey – at a busy intersection when I found myself in the wrong lane for the road I needed to turn into, but that was my own fault for not activating “Lane Assist”.

I clocked up a lot of mileage over the next three months, tootling around Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Essex. Dreevo told me the speed limit of the roads I was on as well as my actual driving speed, but what I really appreciated was the audible speed camera alerts. For the most part, Dreevo got me wherever I wanted to go without any misguided detours.

The only time I had a problem was trying to get home from Milton Keynes in the early hours of one morning. Dreevo was determined to send me onto the M1, which I knew I had to avoid because the exit I needed was closed for overnight road works. Every time I ignored Dreevo’s instruction to enter the M1, it told me to double-back at the next roundabout: “Enter roundabout, take 4th exit”.

Maybe there’s a way to force it to take a certain route, but at that time of night I couldn’t figure it out. The more I ignored Dreevo, the further I was driving in the wrong direction. Since Dreevo only showed me my immediate surroundings, I had no idea where I was in relation to where I wanted to be. I peevishly told Dreevo to shut up, pulled into a petrol station and asked the man in the kiosk for directions.

Dreevo redeemed itself on our next expedition, getting me to a specific hotel slap bang in the middle of London’s congestion zone. With road closures in Westminster forcing me to skip one turning after another, Dreevo couldn’t recalculate my route fast enough. Eventually, I cursed the impatient man who was attempting to drive his taxi up my exhaust pipe, pulled off the road and waited for Dreevo to catch up.

Getting home again from London later that evening was straightforward and uneventful. And that, my friends, is praise indeed.

The brainchild of French company, Mobile Devices, Dreevo is a consumer grade device with fleet functions, and is currently deployed in fleets in numerous industry sectors, including transport/dispatch, emergency vehicles, taxis, etc. It is sold in the UK, Europe, USA, South Africa, Australia and Asia.

#Dreevo #GPS #satnav #mobiledevices #maps