All new cars must have the devices from 7 July, adding fuel economy as well as safety. Will mpg become the new mph?
All new cars must have the devices from 7 July, adding fuel economy as well as safety. Will mpg become the new mph?
In the highway code and the law courts, there is no doubt what those big numbers in red circles mean. As a quick trip up any urban street or motorway with no enforcement cameras makes clear though, many drivers still regard speed signs as an aspiration rather than a limit.
Technology that will be required across Europe from this weekend may change that culture, because from 7 July all new cars sold in the EU and in Northern Ireland must have a range of technical safety features fitted as standard. The most notable of these is intelligent speed assistance – or colloquially, a speed limiter.
The rest of the UK is theoretically free, as ministers once liked to put it, to make the most of its post-Brexit freedoms, but the integrated nature of car manufacturing means new vehicles here will also be telling their drivers to take their foot off the accelerator. Combining satnav maps with a forward camera to read the road signs, they will automatically sound an alarm if driven too fast for the zone they are in.
This sounds like blown up bullshit.
How does this speed limiter work exactly, I don't see that mentioned anywhere.
If I drive Autobahn it's not the same as driving passed a school in the city. How does the speed limiter know the speed limit?
To know that accurately, sounds like a somewhat expensive mandatory piece of equipment.
And how come I have heard absolutely zero about this from either car reviewers or local news media?
I looked it up for my country (Denmark), these are NOT mandatory that I can find, and they can ONLY be installed by public authorized shops, and from the paperwork required, it seems like the installer decides the limit, there are no mandatory limits.
Intelligent speed assistance seems to be a thing, but this is a pretty crucial part:
The ISA system is required to work with the driver and not to restrict his/her possibility to act in any moment during driving. The driver is always in control and can easily override the ISA system.
From the OP the Guardian article:
Drivers of most new cars will be familiar with similar features already installed, but they are currently easy to override.
Yes and that's how it will continue to be with Intelligent speed assistance.
Article is bullshit these are NOT speed limiters, which is a completely different thing, despite that I can see numerous articles in English erroneously calling this speed limiters, when it's nothing of the sort.
Otherwise, what's an ACTUAL speed limiter called? You know like what is popular in many new cars, that have speed limiters that prevent you from driving faster than for instance 160 km/h.
I know most Mercedes cars have had speed limiters for many years, but those were traditionally at 250 km/h.
An engine governor sounds more like preventing revving it to high.
"Combining satnav maps with a forward camera to read the road signs, they will automatically sound an alarm if driven too fast for the zone they are in."
"From now on, however, cars will be designed with systems that are impossible to permanently turn off, restarting each time the engine does. Will car lovers see this as pure progress?"
It doesn't sound hard to disable... speakers only have 2 wires. Snip-Snip.
You aren't disabling the system, that still works fine, it just has no output.
The one thing nobody is fixing is the constant phone use in cars. This issue is far more common than speeding and creates jams and dangerous situations all the time. Makes me hate being a part of traffic. I tend to speed by about 10% on highways but never in 30 and 50 zones. The very idea of a "smart" car taking control of my brake, throttle or steering makes me wanna barf.
Cars are, themselves, the problem. We've created a two ton rolling death machine and now we're stuck adding more and more features to address the original sin of unleashing them across the country to begin with.
The very idea of a “smart” car taking control of my brake, throttle or steering makes me wanna barf.
Its that, or people will be forced to endure the unlimited nightmare indignity of taking the train/bus.
My car lets me set a threshold - currently +7mph. I can see on the dashboard when I’ve exceeded my self-imposed threshold, vs when I am between that and the actual speed limit. Actually I wish it would do a bit more, like turn yellow.
I also ignore it in crowded areas, and pedestrian crossings, school zones, construction zones with people working, etc.
Although I’m really pissed at whoever thought the wide straight parkway leading through the woods up to my workplace is 15 mph. That’s the reason people ignore speed limits
However it is not set by anyone but me, never limits the vehicle, doesn’t make noise, and doesn’t get reported to anyone (as far as I know).
They wont be new when most people have used and adapted to them. Limiting speed is taking control. I can imagine situations when having the ability to speed up can save your life or avoid a crash (think overtaking, avoiding falling obstacles or percieved danger from other vehicles with distracted drivers). Theres's a lot more about this then just limiting speed.
My comment on US plans to make impaired driving detectors mandatory also applies to these speed limiters.. I admire the desire to make it safer, but holy shit are car manufacturers going to jump on this opportunity to sell out all of your driving data to insurance companies, causing your rates to randomly double and removing any semblance of privacy, and it will also involve additional parts and sensors that will be as closely corner cut as legally allowed such that it breaks as frequently as possible.
a "safe" idea, sure, do I want it, absolutely not, and I will never trust a corporation to implement it 'correctly'.
They already sell you all that data sorry to tell ya. Never allow your car to access your contact list unless ya want the manufacturer to sell that data off too
Well, they don't sell that from me, because I drive a car that's 31 years old lmfao. No car built past 2014 has any kind of draw for me, specifically because of these kinds of privacy invasions and general corporate bullshittery.
Is it a little beep or a constant alarm? I can't imagine that many drivers would tolerate having a constant alarm.
I'm in the USA and my impression here is that currently safety advocates are happy to set very low speed limits, drivers are happy to ignore those speed limits, and so everything works out. If speed limits were actually consistently enforced, I imagine there would be a lot of push-back against the politicians responsible.
We need to breed a new generation of drivers who find driving in a more relaxed manner can be just as rewarding.
Come to my town. If you obey the speed limit you hit almost every light on red. Do 5-10 mph over and you hit most on green.
If you are at a red, the light will not change most times until there is a decent amount of traffic coming from another direction. When they get closer, they will get a red and you get a green. Making them stop.
I want to meet the idiots who designed this system.
In the Netherlands we have traffic calming stuff everywhere. The result is that there is very little speeding going on. Distracted driving is another matter though..
there are many people who don't want to drive, don't care about the act of driving, and don't respect the vehicle.
it would help if these people weren't forced to drive.
I think people drive at speeds their comfortable with not some arbitrary number over any posted limit. In my state, they limit freeway speeds to 65MPH but I'll usually do 75-80MPH in a big chain with all the other people commuting. Last time we were in Montana, the posted limit was 80MPH and I still only drove 75-80MPH because I feel comfortable at that speed.
Yeah in one of my previous cars you could set a speed above which the car would warn. I tried it and above the set speed the alarm would constantly sound. This was probably the initial implementation. The car also had an assist camera to avoid low speed collisions. So all the tech was already in the car.. that was a Skoda from 2013.
I like how we collectively create nanny-states, then turn around and bitch when the cops have too much power. I hate how there really isn't any good solution to many problems because of the human factor.
My dad got something similar build into his car, its wrong so many times especially when road signs are confusing at construction sites.
Example: Construction site limits speed to 60kmh and there is an exit coming up that goes through the actual construction site, that has a speed limit on the the exit of 30kmh, guess what. The car sees the 30kmh sign but doesnt understand its only for cars exiting but alarms the driver now until.the next 60kmh sign.
So in order for this to work properly road signs have to be normalized all around the EU, which i don't see happening anytime soon.
Worse is the other way around, but if you then speed because the system doesn’t work, it’s of course still your own fault.
I know why they want it and I mostly agree, but they’re massively downplaying the reliability concerns, saying it is “usually correct” (It’s not) and “data will improve”, conveniently ignoring that these underlying systems aren’t new and the data has consistently sucked over its entire lifetime. They don’t provide a target date by which they want this data to be available, so it will never be.
Anecdotally, on a 30km drive, my car (which receives updates to nav data over cellular) is wrong 5-10 times, in both directions.
I wish regulations like this would help people realize that all along they were casual racing enthusiasts, and then spending time on the track for a few hours would become a weekend activity for many. Then we’d see an explosion of track cars vs grocery cars, and more tracks everywhere. That would be a positive outcome of something like this, per my pov.
Perhaps this type of speeding regulation is also meant to help self driving cars? I am guessing that monitoring and predicting the variable speed of many other vehicles on the road is quite a task.
Yes, please. We need more Mazda MX-5s, less SUVs on the road and in terms of offers from car manufacturers. I know, technically not a track car, but you can still have lots of fun with it on the track without spending several peoples' kidneys worth.
Eh, yes please! I like your POV. Nothing wrong with wanting to drive fast, but racing in traffic is :). More tracks around would make it a lot more normal to go do your thing. Yeah, I see it :-)
I live in a rural area. If I call an ambulance, that's a minimum--minimum--of 20 minutes for any ambulance to get to me. Then it's another 20 minutes to get to an emergency room. I know someone who is a doctor that lives close to me, and their husband got stung by a bunch of yellow jackets. Their husband is allergic. They gave their husband a shit ton of meds, and made it to the ER in under 15 minutes. As it was, he barely avoided getting put on a ventilator, and that was with perfect care and driving 90+ mph on two lane mountain roads to get to a hospital. (He has an epinephrine pen now.) With a "smart" speed limiter on their car? He wouldn't have been breathing by the time they got to the ER.
When you live in a rural area, and emergency help is a long way away (honestly, 20 min ain't that bad compared to other parts of the state where it can be more like 45+ minutes just to get an ambulance out), it's really, really easy to argue against that kind of nanny state nonsense.
Presumably ambulances and other such emergency vehicles would be exempt from such devices? But I agree with you anyway since ambulances are expensive and having to choose between driving slow in your own car with a limiter and calling for an ambulance and going bankrupt should not be a choice someone has to make in a split second during an emergency.
Presumably ambulances and other such emergency vehicles would be exempt from such devices?
Okay, but that misses the point.
This doctor was driving at the speeds that an ambulance would have been driving, but only had to make the trip in one direction. It took them 20 minutes, from stings, to pulling into the ER (15 minutes of that being driving time). If they had called an ambulance, it would have been a minimum of 30-40 minutes, because the ambulance would have to get to them first.
And again - 20 minutes for an ambulance to get to you is not all that bad, relative to even more rural areas, and counties that don't even have a hospital or doctors.
An ambulance is a truck, and handles like one, they won't be going as fast as a car on a two-lane mountain road - it isn't possible to keep it on the road with perfect driving at speeds a small car can go. (an ambulance could be made smaller, but that is at the expensive of equipment they have inside so not a great compromise.)
It’s already a pretty common feature. My car has a speed limit sign reader and flashes a warning on the screen when you reach the speed limit.
It also has a button to set the car’s speed limiter to the detected speed limit.
It gets it wrong quite frequently though. Sometimes it misses signs and other times it picks up a sign on a side road that goes ahead where the road that you are on turns. I don’t know how it decides to handle national speed limit signs - sometimes it shows a national speed limit sign on the dash but other times it shows 60 or 70 instead.
My car happily understands 10tonn signs as 10km/h limit, or pedestrian crossings as motorway (130km/h max). It also hss zero awareness if a speed limit is still relevant (eg have we passed an intersection since).
I like the school zone ones where it shows 15 even though there is no flashing to indicate its 15. It'd need to be smarter to govern by this detection. Perhaps emitting a wireless signal even to make it harder to miss?
Technology that will be required across Europe from this weekend may change that culture, because from 7 July all new cars sold in the EU and in Northern Ireland must have a range of technical safety features fitted as standard.
The rest of the UK is theoretically free, as ministers once liked to put it, to make the most of its post-Brexit freedoms, but the integrated nature of car manufacturing means new vehicles here will also be telling their drivers to take their foot off the accelerator.
Safety is the overriding reason for slower speeds, and as charities such as Brake and Rospa emphasise, even small increases above 30mph make a significant difference in outcomes, particularly for those who are not driving the car.
Yousif Al-Ani, the principal engineer for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) at Thatcham Research, says: “Modern vehicles are very good at protecting occupants in the event of a collision through passive safety features, such as airbag and crumple zones, but these have limited benefit to vulnerable road users” such as pedestrians and cyclists.
With the precise readings of computers replacing wobbly speedometer needles, however, and a new generation of speed cameras upping the ante on the enforcement side, it may be ever harder to disown responsibility.
Questions remain over whether the technology works well enough in all real-life situations, and how comfortable people will feel with their car telling them what to do, let alone taking control of their steering, brakes and acceleration – a potentially alarming and disorienting experience.
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Alternatively, that same functionality could be used to tell you what the speed limit is. My cars GPS will display the speed limit on the map if it knows it. It’s great to get the extra info, and nothing is controlling my car
I always wondered why this wasn't already a thing. Except for the Autobahn in Germany, where in the entire world are you allowed to drive 120+ MPH on a public road?
Edit: If you're not even gonna give a response with your downvotes, I'm just gonna assume you're an asshole who speeds for no good reason.