“Every car we were driving with was heading that direction…” Shelby Easler says in a TikTok video, “so we assumed this was going somewhere…”
But SFGate reports that instead of a handy “alternate route,” Google Maps was leading her and her two passengers “far off the major highway and into Nevada’s fierce deserts on an off-roading trail.”
Easler’s car were not the only bushwackers. In Shelby’s viral TikTok, a trail of cars closely follows behind them. “The first driver that turned around talked to us to tell us that the road gets washed out the higher into the mountain you get, and we have to turn around since the path leads nowhere. He was in a huge truck and was just driving straight through the bushes and shrubs to let people know to turn around,” Easler said.
1.5 million people have viewed Easler’s earlier footage of their road to nowhere. The off-roading trail was apparently only wide enough for traffic in one direction, and attempting to return in that other direction, “We were driving over bushes and rocks and alot of the cars couldn’t even make it,” Easler says in the second video. “Which is kind of why our car broke down.”
They told SFGate that ultimately “We had to leave the car in Vegas, and it got towed to the service center of a dealership. They said the rear, right tire was coming off, and the alignment was messed up too. Low-key a pretty expensive fix.”
They eventually called the highway patrol to shut down the road that Google Maps was sending people to, because “With every car coming in, every single car was getting trapped.”
