Everyone laughs at reports of credulous goons who blindly follow directions from their GPS and drive into lakes or train tunnels. But I recently found there’s an even worse fate that can befall the hapless GPS acolyte.

I was driving in the US when the Google-powered GPS on my Android phone directed me off the freeway onto a rutted side road that was probably last repaved back when the Atari 2600 was the pinnacle of technology. Blithely, perhaps idiotically, I followed, figuring it was some sort of Palo Alto-approved shortcut.

About two klicks down the side road, I spy a Ram 2500 coming towards me. No problem – the road was easily wide enough for us to pass, even for a modern Ram pickup, which is only marginally smaller than a department store – except that about 50 metres out, the guy swerved across the road onto a collision course with me. Deliberately swerved – this wasn’t the idle lane-drift of an alfalfa farmer playing Candy Crush on his steering wheel, this was the hungry lunge of a crazed redneck who has watched Death Proof too many times.

My pulse rate went from resting 60s to a jackrabbiting frenzy, as if I’d just spotted an In-N-Out restaurant without a queue. And I barely had time to shout something a bit blue when I saw in the rear view: the Redneck Kamikaze Killer was trying to pull a three-point turn. Now, the dirt shoulder was plenty roomy enough to swerve my little Ford on, or even raise quarter horses, but it was a bit tight for the Myers-sized Ram.

A man made of sterner stuff – or who has watched Deliverance fewer times – than I, might have stopped and confronted the ruffian, and schooled him in the finer points of what we simple city folk like to call “not murdering people”. Not me. I floored it, and with Google as my co-pilot… almost drove down a dead-end dirt track.

If I had followed the Google directions, and stoppered myself in a dead-end road – or if the dead-end hadn’t been sign-posted – then the Psycho Pickup Ripper would have had time to complete his seven-point turn, and I’d currently be fertilising someone’s alfalfa, or possibly chained up and wearing a ball-gag in some backwoods tractor shed.

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Now, just for the record, I was driving from southern California to Yuma, Arizona. That’s the same Arizona where Uber has been operating self-driving semi-trailers on the road for the past few months. A self-driving vehicle is only as good as the map it’s following, and I’m here to tell you – barely – that the maps are still not all the way there.

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So if you’re driving in the rural south-west someday, and you have to choose between being stalked by self-driving semis or getting off the freeway into the hunting grounds of a crazed yokel high from smoking GMO alfalfa, you’ll get how I feel: we should have just stuck with paper maps and the Atari 2600.