TomTom Sat-Navs Lose Their Way

At least several hundred TomTom sat-nav owners worldwide became the victims of a “leap year” bug that prevented the devices from establishing their location through a GPS satellite.

Starting last Saturday, some models sold by the leading manufacturer of navigation systems in Europe went offline, leaving customers stranded on the roads without any guidance.

But the company issued a fix for the problem earlier today.

Losing it

The affected devices displayed a grey screen and a message saying the machine lacked a GPS signal. On Tuesday, after countless complaints, the Dutch company finally acknowledged the problem with its global positioning system firmware and started working on a patch.

According to TomTom, the bug was hiding in the software of the GPS receiver provided by a third party.

“I feel this should have been made public earlier to alert customers to the problem,” one of the company’s customers told BBC.

Potentially affected navigation devices, including both new and discontinued products, were: Start 20/25, Via 120/125, Via LIVE 120/125, GO LIVE 820/825 and GO LIVE 1000/1005/1005 World.

A software update fixing the issue is now available via MyTomTom. You can download it here.

However, there are reports that the fix doesn’t work in all cases and some users still experience problems. The company advises customers to reset their device after the patch has been applied, and warns it could take several minutes before the navigator establishes a GPS connection.

Last year, the Royal Academy of Engineering warned that British over-reliance on satellite navigation could lead to dangerous consequences, including loss of life.

And in February this year, research by the government-backed Sentinel consortium had shown that GPS jammer use in the UK is on the rise.

This is not the first major fault caused by leap years. On 28 February, a leap year issue forced parts of the Microsoft Azure cloud platform to go offline all over the world. Victims of the bug  included the UK government’s G-Cloud CloudStore.

People can still get enjoyment out of sat-navs, of course. Research has found that using Darth Vader’s voice for navigation increases children’s happiness in the car by almost 70 percent. More than 300 baby and toddler volunteers took part in Project GAGA, a six month NavLab research project to find the perfect sat-nav voice for families with small children.

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