Originally Posted By: Tyber
My thoughts on that is what happenes whne the GPS looses signal or the signal gets distored.

The GPS will detect this. It's part of Life As A GPS Receiver, and why some effort is needed to do it right.

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I have had my GPS think that I was up to 30 feet off to the left or right when I was in heavy clowd cover. (disclaimer it is a Verizon Wireless cell GPS)

30' is probably not far from the accuracy limit of a cell-phone GPS. A plow is probably using some kind of correction scheme not available to a cell-phone. Real-time Differential GPS is the likely choice.

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What I noticed was that though the drivers were being visited and having gas topped off by the athorities they never thought of extracting them. Why not put people in a sled or a ATV trailer and extract them to a warm place then return them once the plowing has resumed.

1. The Highway patrol may have limited resources for operating in that kind of environment. It takes fewer snowmobiles to haul some fuel to stuck cars than to extract all of the people.

2. A lot of people will be reluctant to leave their cars behind - that car is a big financial asset to abandon for many people. They may also have valuables, pets, heirlooms etc they don't want to leave - the Highway Patrol doesn't want to get into that!