Following six months of research and rigorous tests, TomTom’s Navigation Laboratory (NavLab) has discovered that Darth Vader’s navigation voice increases children’s happiness in the car by over 68%.
More than 300 baby and toddler volunteers took parts in Project GAGA, the NavLab research project to find the perfect satnav voice for families with small children.
Of course this has been TomTom’s April Fools’ joke.
But jokes aside, I used the TomTom 750 GPS last year during my self-drive family holiday in Germany with two young kids in tow.
You won’t believe how much fun the kids had listening to the various voices providing turn-by-turn navigation instructions from the portable navigation device.
We tried out Bugs Bunny, Homer Simpsons and Ken with the Australian accent.
But it was Darth Vader and Yoda which battled it out for the top favourite spot. Eventually, we decided the dark lord had just that bit of an edge over the benevolent Jedi master.
To be honest, I had initially thought the celebrity voices feature was a useless gimmick.
But after we had so much fun, we really liked it. The whole family had such a laugh on those long drives imitating the accents and nuances of those voices.
We were like going “Turn around where possible … <heavy breathing> … I sense your lack of faith disturbing,” and “Take the left turn … <heavy breathing> … and face your destiny, you are coming over … <heavy breathing> … to the dark side”.
New Zealand-based Valerie Cross of TomTom told me during her visit to Singapore that the All Blacks did a recording too for TomTom – who had truckloads of fun improvising around the provided script.
I would love to hear that some time.