As the Spring Festival holiday approaches, many friends are planning self-driving tours, which will only intensify the peak in road travel. With the rapid expansion of the road network, while travel has become more convenient, finding your way has also become a major challenge. For drivers, especially newcomers and those like this reporter who lack an innate sense of direction, the biggest hassle during a self-driving trip might just be figuring out the route. Fortunately, we have navigation devices！But what you may not know is that these devices can not only help us directionally challenged folks reach our destinations smoothly with just voice commands, but also offer many unexpected functions that we should make good use of.
The ultimate guide for your self-driving journey
Many enthusiastic self-drivers often get headaches over complicated road routes. Seeing others plan great self-driving itineraries, they too want to follow the same routes. But trying to replicate those routes on a GPS is no easy feat—you first have to jot down the route details by hand, then input each stop into the GPS one by one. If the route is long, that can get really tedious.
In fact, this problem is quite easy to solve. Interested friends can visit specialized self-driving websites to download their favorite self-driving route maps. On these sites, many fellow drivers use GPS to record the routes they’ve taken—these are called track logs. All you need to do is find a suitable route, download it to your own GPS device, and follow that track directly. You don’t have to input every single destination along the way, and yet you’ll still get full-route navigation. Your car’s navigation system becomes like a personal guide for your self-driving adventure. Even if you’re traveling solo, you’ll feel confident and well-prepared. It’s been reported that most in-car navigation systems today come with the ability to download recorded tracks, and there are plenty of websites offering track log downloads.
Share your “footprints”
Nowadays, sharing your travel adventures online with friends has become quite the trend. And with the little in-car navigation system in your hands, you can do just that. Using specific software, you can sync the travel routes and timestamps recorded by your GPS with the timestamps of your camera photos, and then input the latitude and longitude coordinates shown on your navigation device into each photo. Then upload these photos to a dedicated satellite map website. This way, your friends can get a clear visual of the places you've traveled and learn about what you saw and experienced there through the photos. Just imagine: decades later, when you open the software and see the Earth dotted with location markers of all the places you've been, how amazing would that feel！
Be a big help in emergencies
Picture this: it's a snowy, windy night, and you’re deep in some extremely remote wilderness when your car breaks down. After much effort, you manage to call for help. But when the person on the other end asks for your location, you suddenly draw a blank—because in such an out-of-the-way place, there are no road signs or house numbers. How can anyone come to your rescue if you can’t describe where you are？This is when your in-car navigation device comes to the rescue. As long as it has a clear view of the sky, it can provide location coordinates without any restrictions！These latitude and longitude coordinates are unique and can even be reverse-looked up, thus offering vital assistance for rescue efforts. That said, most private towing services may not be able to use this information to locate you—most of the time, you’ll still need to rely on official, large-scale rescue platforms.