Aren’t sat-navs great? No more struggling to read that huge Ordnance Survey map unfolding halfway across the windscreen. No more having to look up indexes at the back of the road atlas for place names, only to find out that the dog has chewed all the pages from Lowestoft to Rickmansworth. No more advice from backseat drivers.

No more finally pinpointing the tiny side road you need to take, only for a child to open a window and send the map flying across the car.

Of course, there are down sides. If you are not concentrating fully you can find yourself a little off course. Quite a way off course.

It happened last month when a Syrian lorry driver aiming to get to Gibraltar left Turkey and ended up in Skegness. The Gibraltar Point nature reserve in Lincolnshire, to be precise.

The sat-nav voice, that’s a bit of a downer, too. When you ignore its advice, it informs you that it is “recalculating”, in a voice that implies: “You have let us all down.”

On the plus side, though, by doing away with bickering with your wife over road directions, sat-navs liberate you to argue about a whole new range of things. Such as whether Skegness is nicer than Gibraltar.

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