Paddy Comyn

speaker

255 appearances 6 recordings 2 series first heard May 2026 last heard 15 Sep

Paddy Comyn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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Today with David McCullagh · Safety alert over sat-navs diverting drivers on to country roads · 11 Jun 2026 podcast

It's not looking at the type of car you're in, the width of the car you're in.

And obviously with the crowdsourcing technology of a lot of the Google Maps and Waze, as you mentioned, if there is a crash on a main road, it can end up diverting a whole load of people through a small town, which doesn't have the...

capability to to handle it or a small village and that can cause issues and does cause issues so um so look i think people need to um maybe just take a pause and see do they need to save those five minutes obviously if it's a huge huge delay there's a tendency to want to divert off but sometimes it's safer to stick to the to the wider and and uh you know dual carriageway or motorway yeah stick with comfort over speed um

Yeah, look, there is a danger of us totally abdicating that sort of spatial skill to technology.

There was a study in the UK years ago where they did brain scans of taxi drivers in the UK and they had larger hippocampus than other people because they had developed the knowledge, as they call it, of learning every street.

And they had developed that part of their brain which maps routes.

Some people like to picture routes in their head.

Some people...

rely on the instructions so it really depends on the person but yeah we are there's one argument to say okay you can concentrate on the road ahead of you if you are using a navigation system but the other says that you know it's unfortunate and we know that some people use that to look at other things or allow themselves to be distracted and less aware as they say abdicating the responsibilities of technology Okay we have a text in saying turn off eco mode on Google Maps and it keeps you on main roads I wasn't aware of that

Yeah, there's an eco mode on Google Maps, which is for people who drive maybe EVs and they want to conserve their range or who want to save fuel.

And that will tend to keep you off motorways and keep you onto sort of back roads where the roads are slower and therefore you'll save more fuel.

Yeah, it is.

Screens are getting bigger.

I've been in cars recently which have 15-inch screens in the centre, and that's about the size of an average laptop.

Now, Euro NCAP, who are in charge of looking after safety regulations for cars, have...

now introduced a metric where they will require some manufacturers to start reintroducing physical buttons and will mark them down if they don't have them.

So we probably will start to see a change.

I know some major manufacturers are going back towards physical buttons away from the touch screens where they can.

But look, so if you go into some models, the screen is dominated by a massive center screen and that's time with your eyes off the road, unfortunately.

I think consider whether if you're in a crazy hurry, if you know that there's a crash ahead and there's a big delay, it might be the right option.

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