A 47-year-old man from North Carolina in USA died as he drove his car off a broken bridge into a river at night while he was following the directions being given by GPS on the best route home.

“It was a dark and rainy night and he was following his GPS which led him down a concrete road to a bridge that dropped off into a river,” Paxson’s mother-in-law, Linda McPhee Koenig, said in a Facebook post.

She also alleged that the bridge did not have any safety barriers or signs that could have warned Mr Paxson about the danger that night when he was returning after celebrating his daughter’s 9th birthday.

“It was a totally preventable accident. We are grieving his death,” she wrote.

Authorities with the North Carolina State Highway Patrol responded to reports of an overturned vehicle in a creek near 24th Street Place Northeast — a private road — in Catawba County, according to a local WCNC report.

Even barricades that had previously warned drivers not to cross the bridge had been washed away, WCNC reported.