Watch the video of the incident below.
[rumble video_id=v5gmrb domain_id=u7nb2]
Video credit: Rumble
Legal consultant Mohammad Zafar, 35, is warning others about being too trusting of vehicle navigation devices after his car got trapped in a waterlogged farm ditch after he blindly followed his car’s sat-navigation directions.
Mohammad left Rochdale, Greater Manchester to join his cousins for a camping weekend near Windermere, Cumbria. However, just five miles from his destination he took a wrong turn.
Despite the ‘pitch black’ conditions, Mohammad trusted his sat navigation which was telling him he was headed in the right direction. Three miles from the road, his Mini Countryman got trapped in a ditch.
Emergency services needed a location so that they could help but Mohammad didn’t know where he was. The hapless city dweller had to endure three hours in the cold until a family search party eventually found him despite the spotty phone signal. He ended up abandoning the car in the meantime and just headed to the campsite.
The entire weekend was spent searching for a way to remove his car from the Lake District field without success. But just before they needed to return home, Mohammad managed to find a specialist 4×4 company that could tow his car back to the road.
Mohammad has decided to sell his car in light of what happened.
He said: “I was late setting off and hadn’t left until about 10:30 pm at night, so by the time I got lost it was already the early hours of Saturday morning.
“I had started driving towards the Lake District and put the center address into the sat-navigation. It was saying I was about five miles away and then I took a wrong turn, but the sat navigation said I was still going in the right direction so I carried on.
“I ended up in a bit of an obscure place, it was pitch black and it started taking me onto a really narrow track but I still thought it was fine because the sat navigation was telling me to go that way.
“Then I noticed it was saying I was two hours away, but by that point, I couldn’t turn round and I couldn’t even see which way I had come it was so dark.
“I carried on and the car got stuck in a ditch, that’s when I really started to panic.
“I couldn’t move the car at all, it wouldn’t go forward or reverse and the ditch was surrounded by water making it hard to push the car anywhere.
“There was no phone signal so I was walking around trying to find reception, I couldn’t even get through emergency so I ended up calling police to see if any of the emergency services could help me, but they told me that without knowing my location there was nothing they could do.
“Even breakdown rescue services wouldn’t help me without my location so I started doing anything I could think of to find my location on my phone, eventually I managed to find my latitude and longitude and got hold of my cousins to tell them.
“But it was still another three hours until they managed to get to me, I was being attacked by so many different flies, spiders and other insects which were being attracted by the headlights, and when the search party arrived it was another hour walk to the car because they’d parked on the roadside.
“I didn’t actually get to the campsite until 6 am on Saturday morning.”
While Mohammad didn’t let the mishap ruin his weekend, he did become the laughing stock of the trip and had to endure a lot of jibes from his cousins.
What’s ironic is that Mohammad rarely uses sat-navigation in the first place. This experience only makes him more distrustful of the technology and said he’ll first thoroughly research any destination he hadn’t been to before.