I personally completely agree, but let's play devil's advocate: Many safety regulations exist for precisely these circumstances: grey areas where an intellectu

I personally completely agree, but let's play devil's advocate: Many safety regulations exist for precisely these circumstances: grey areas where an intellectual consideration of the situation would cause the safety feature to not be needed, but people rush, are careless, or just stupid. And we deem that even hurried careless stupid people deserve to be safe. There is a second factor: How do people treat navigation direction (from Google Maps or otherwise)? I think when they first came out, they were an assist - an augment to the existing driver's careful consideration of their route. Not so anymore. I have friends that will absolutely never overrule Google Maps under ANY circumstances. Even if they are visiting a city that they don't know, and are driving with a local, and the local says "Oh don't take that road, it'll be terrible, turn here intead", they'll say "no, I'd prefer to follow the nav". Some of this is occasionally justified. Local wisdom and old wives tales about faster roads and shortcuts do not incorporate active live traffic conditions like Google Maps can. But a lot of it is simply that the thought process has been reversed. People are defaulting to trusting the sat nav to make the navigation decision COMPLETELY - and they focus on the moment to moment driving conditions. This level of trust has been EARNED by the quality of the product. Which means it's entirely reasonable for 2 people to face a snowy mountain road, have one of them say "This looks sketchy, maybe we shouldn't go", and have the other respond "Yeah but Google Maps wouldn't have recommended it if it was. So it must be safe". And that would be a logical counter-argument. So no, the Google Engineer's defense isn't actually very good. In situations like this, yes, it MIGHT be better for a mainsteam product to default to "no safe options", similar how you can check "no toll roads" in your settings and only get directions for free roads. Suggesting sketchy back roads should be a setting that you opt in to explicitly. Of course the next step is detecting what is a sketchy mountain road and what isn't, etc. "Paved" might be the threshold I would use. "Include unpaved roads" is the setting I would add - defaulted to off.