We decided on a day out today to the Grotte de Villars. We haven’t been for 9 years so thought I’d put on the GPS, don’t know North Dordogne very well. I thought it should be about an hour. I remembered there are lots of signs once you are close so just put in Villars. The GPS said it would take quite a bit longer than I’d thought but figured I had remembered incorrectly. We were just driving and chatting, however we should have become suspicious when we passed into the Charente, or when we saw how close we were to Angouleme (at 28km). Eventually at 14 kms from Angouleme we stopped and looked by zooming out and discovered that there is another Villars on the outskirts of Angouleme 
We found a lovely picnic spot just near the border so total travel time, with the picnic was 3 hours instead of just over one . I am quite dippy but that takes the cake!!
I learned the hard way that it is unwise to give a “lieu dit” as your locaion - years ago we were staying in a gitein a small hamlet when we had problems with the car battery (lights left on = totally flat)
There are rather a lot of " Saint André"'s in france 
There are so many places in France with identical names, and invariably we seem to want to go to the smaller one, which doesn’t appear on the car’s sat nav.
These days, after several mishaps I check the route beforehand on Google maps, so we have the right departement, expected journey time and, most importantly the route; because so often sat nav tries to take you off the main road in order to save a few kilometres’ distance.
Satnav is handy but pretty unreliable. The positioning is accurate but the routing is dodgy. You can check it out by using it to route to somewhere near you, it’ll often choose a silly route when you know a much better one. Our car satnav has taken us down impassible village roads. It’s an aid, not an oracle 
I always try to know towards which compass point I should be heading, so that if it’s 9am and I’m supposed to be going North-West, but I’m driving into the sun, then something is definitely amiss.
You’re dead right. Our GPS was taking us in circles in Turin and I just ignored it and headed west, after a while it sorted itself out. To be honest I wouldn’t bother with it except I couldn’t read a map on the car seat, like I used to do, and look out the windscreen without bifocals.
I use the route overview before heading off, thats to check it is the right place and to see what main roads are available and the Estima paintwork doesnt appreciate narrow lanes. It also helps like the old days of maps to have a mental picture of where you are heading.
Check what route settings you have active.
By default, my Duster’s satnav has the use of toll roads, ferries and tidal roads enabled.
It also thinks several local farm tracks that aren’t even communal chemins are actual roads.
I second the having the car’s bearing/direction of travel shown on the GPS is a very good idea as is having a rough idea of the direction of your route.
Route overview is always a good idea. Need to be careful if you stop for a break and then resume, that the route doesn’t get changed to something you don’t want - like being taken via Paris instead of roads that avoid the city - because it’s apparently faster.
I assume those who dont know how to adjust their setting do just that meaning roads around Paris or any other major city are clogged up. I often put in a mid point into the planning to bend the route away from known issues satnav like to include.
@toryroo As far as I know there are no duplicate place names within the same Departement, but may be in other ones, so the golden rule I have always followed is insisting on having the postcode, thus you would not have crossed the Charente border.
This was brought home to me when I was working as a lorry driver here, I was misdirected from Lyon to Besancon, many hours away. On the following Saturday I thought I would be in trouble so decided to go into the office all guns blazing ‘Denis, never, ever, give me an address without a postcode’. The whole office erupted in laughter but the point was made, and he never did again.
But the other golden rule I always followed with satnavs was, if you have a computer with Google maps on, always pinpoint your destination and note the coords (latitude and longitude), that is always right.
But I’m glad you enjoyed the borderlands. 
And I was very pleased, and now surprised, that we saw you here on the 7th of June. 
Satnavs are quite rapidly ‘coming of age’ - now, on most - certainly Waze - you can enter the whole address that will send you to the ‘correct’ destination…
Now, I am just waiting for them to really grow up read my mind and accept that no, I do not want to go to Paris en route to Dieppe…
I have an ancient TomTom, which is useful and more up-to-date than the car satnav, However, it used to be betterand I think i know why. In our departement many years ago they reorganised the land boundaries in order to reverse the fragmentation of land resulting from the splits caused by inheritance laws. Many small chemins which used to be public roads were suppressed as a result of that and the official maps reflected the changes, both on paper and on-line (and in satnavs)
However, a few years later, the rights to use those official maps became (I think) more expensive and TomTom for example reverted to the old maps, which is why it used the now-suppressed chemins.
Aother problem is that at the end of our (public) chemin, many of the maps show a gap in the road it joins so satnavs always guide us in one direction, takibng us all round the houses if we want to go north rather than south. We know, but our visitors don’t and no matter how many times I report the map error it doesn’t get changed!
Ah, I don’t have that problem, because I don’t use the satnav for directions, the voice was turned off completely years ago soon after purchase.
I always plan my own routes using Google and/or my large wall map then print my own route out according to the Coords. The Satnav is useful as a moving map (plus an estimate of time and distance) which can be seen without moving my hands and with only brief glances, as I would for signposts, with my eyes. The route they suggest has no importance for me and, without the voice, nobody shouts at me because of that.
Oh how true is that, its why I binned TomTom, they want the money but dont provide the service
The only chink it that plan is a road accident (of which quite a few in France) showing up with Waze and users reporting re routing is very handy.
I’ve had Garmin satnavs for many years, and they worked well by and large, but the navigation on them has a penchant for taking small back roads rather than main routes, even if you have the navigation set to “fastest route”.
Very annoying in rural areas in France and the UK, especially Devon where you soon end up in a maze of single-track roads with minimal passing places.
This year however I switched to using Google Maps or Waze (which I believe use the same navigation system) on my phone, sent to a CarPlay device mounted on the dashboard of my car or on the handlebars of the motorbike. Previously I’d had my phone on the bike handlebars in a waterproof case and special anti-vibration cradle, but even whith those precautions I wasn’t very confident about exposing it to the elements.
The CarPlay box is fully waterproof and works much better, though as has been said you need to enter a full address and check it before you set off.
My car does have satnav built in but as it’s a 2009 model it runs off a DVD-ROM in the boot, and had its last update in 2014, so that’s pretty useless!
I have been pleasantly surprised by the CarPlay gadgets - nice big touchscreen instead of a tiny phone screen, and various other apps can be loaded on as well. I had been considering getting a new Garmin zumo XT for the motorbike, but the CarPlay unit was a third of the price and lets me use any mapping app I prefer, instead of being forced to use Garmin’s.
I’ve never used TomTom so can’t say how they compare.
Normally, if we are going to an address, I check on the computer and then put the coordinates into my phone (we use OSM as its open source). I just got caught out really by the 2 same named towns both north (albeit one North west and one north east of us ) . We had also misplaced the house keys before we left and spent 1/2 hour looking for them ( they were on the key rack but hidden under some others 
) which probably made us rush a bit which didn’t help! Lesson learned and no harm done (other than slightly cranky 9 year old ).
We have fallen foul of that several times. You’d think we would learn from our mistakes. The worst is when the tracks just stop and there’s nowhere to turn round. Dead end, stone walls, narrow track. We almost ended up in someone’s garden the last time it happened because I’d taken a lieu dit to be correct. Nowadays, a road with grass down the middle is a sure warning sign… Or any road that turns from tarmac to gravel.
Back in the 1980s we were driving along a autoroute-type road in Southern Turkey between Antalya and Finike. Great road, 3 carriageways in each direction and no traffic. At all. We made great time until we went round a right hand bend and the road simply stopped. Not even a gravel track. It turned out the the road was under construction but there was a road builders strike and the sign team had removed all the warning signs.
Incidentally, the Turkish word for strike is ‘grev’ which will be familiar to all francophones…