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Comment by x38iq84n | Hacker News Reader

Every day, everything that comes out of EU is evil. The only effect of this is higher prices of cars and a paved way for more oppression of the ordinary citizen. Today, only new cars need to have new limiters; tomorrow they will criminalise driving a car with them disabled or broken; ultimately they will integrate it with eCall (remember when they mandated to put GPS+GSM in all new cars?) and police all drivers everywhere all the time.

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Hu? The "evil" thing here are cars (emitting poisonous gases, driving climate change, making loud noises etc.) and their reckless drivers (racing those cars in inner cities, not paying attention, claiming losing control of their vehicle was an "accident"…). Anything that limits their use and the freedom of their self-centered users is good.

It's really narrow minded to find all drivers reckless when you clearly cite pathological behaviour that's adopted by a minority of drivers. It shows you do not evaluate this rationally and makes your argument less credible.

From personal experience, I know that most drivers I interact with on a daily basis are reckless and needlessly endanger others for their personal convenience and comfort. This starts at parking on pavements and cycle lanes, not stopping at zebra crossings, going above the speed limit and all sorts of other incursions.

For example, there was recently a statistic floated around that half the people in the UK had been in an accident. Assuming that all these accidents were one-on-one collisions (unlikely, people also "lose control" all by themselves), this suggests that at least 25% of drivers drive recklessly, as they have caused an accident at some point in the past. I do not understand how 25% are "pathological".

Add to this the number of people who also drive recklessly but for sheer luck have not caused an accident yet and those people who have caused accidents without involving other drivers and the above 25% go up even further.

So yes, I stand by my previous comment.

I would argue that the minority of people actually observe speed limits, most people drive over the speed limit out of habit, sometimes only to overtake but a lot of drivers do it and I get a lot of road hate for driving at speed limit or below.

Heh. That 0.001% of malicious users will just stick to old cars or modify their new ones.

Gas emissions and loud noises are set to be gone pretty soon anyway.

Or are you just too self centered to see through your own narrow minded BS?

Downvote all you like, but it won't change a thing that those wilfully reckless drivers just won't get a new car with these limiters or will disable them and will not be impacted, unlike the millions of others who are forced to pay for more useless gadgets in their cars.

It will simply eventually become illegal to run without these limiters just as it is already illegal to use particularly polluting cars in cities (for example). Of course it will also be illegal to disable them. I don’t see how what you’re describing is any sort of credible loop-hole.

You are already admitting that the current proposal will solve nothing, but will require further steps: prosecuting tampering with the limiters, prosecuting driving a car without them (even unknowingly [!]) and so on. All of that to ineffectively substitute the actual work of the police at the expense of every car owner.

Sorry? Cars are checked regularly (at least every two years for example in Germany) where any tampering can be detected and either reversed or further registration for the car refused. This system is already in place and the process of checking brakes, the engine, lights etc only needs to be amended by a process to check this system. I don’t see how this requires substantial "further steps".

The bad actors learned to remove mods before the inspection and then reinstall them long ago.

I don't get why this is evil. I often fear speeding cars, particularly on country roads. I understand people wanting an engine with spare power, but why not make people follow the law if it is fairly simple to do?

Presumably x38iq84n fears a future of always-on vehicle tracking, where a file is kept of every citizen's movements.

Of course, everyone already carries a smart phone with GPS tracking, so you could argue this is no more dystopian than that.

You are very correct. Today, x38iq84ns can leave their phone at home and the phone does not send tickets based on speed and does not call the cops against them based on geofencing. And because the vehicle tracking is not panacea, it will be supported by new "crimes" being prosecuted, involving any form of avoidance from tracking - inevitably trackers will break and people will be prosecuted for driving with a broken (=disabled) tracker. Determined avoiders will find their way and only law-abiding citizens (or so they think) will pay the price.

"why not make people follow the law if it is fairly simple to do?"

That's quite an interesting question, because it seems so common-sense.

I think I know why it's an awful idea, but I'm not sure. I could certainly imagine such a question being used in all kinds of places that I would find uncomfortable, especially with computers being integrated so much into our lives and watching everything we do and think.

There is already a speed limit, this is just enforcement isn't it?

Do you agree with speed limits?

The speed limits are out of date. For highways, the original limits were set by breaking distances. Braking systems have improved tremendously (almost all disk brakes nowadays, ESC and ABS), reducing breaking distances, while the limits were never updated. So yeah, one can disagree with speed limits.

Human reactions however, have not. Don't know where you live but most EU countries have a speed limit of around 100 km/h on the highway. This gives a stopping distance of around 100m for a modern well-maintained car (Which, let's be realistic, most are not). That's a long distance. Now if you take into account that a lot of countries have higher limits (France at 130 km/h for example) and that the braking distance increases exponentially I would disagree that they are outdated.

I disagree that the line between safe and unsafe speed can be distilled down to the same number for every car, every driver, and every weather/road condition. If you’re a good driver in a good car driving on a clear, dry day you should be allowed to drive faster than a bad driver in a bad car on a foggy/icy/rainy day.

Sure. If you then take personal responsibility for every accident even when going at or below the speed limit, I could quite live with this. "Personal responsibility" of course means making good for any and all damage you caused, something which you are typically quite unable to do.

The fact that people still have "accidents" and that these "accidents" are ruled "accidents" and not "willfully crashing their 2 tons of metal into something" suggests that people are not ready to take responsibility for their actions and that they cannot be trusted, even with the current speed limits already in place.

That's right. You should be driving well under the limit if it is foggy, icy or rainy or if you are in a poorly maintained car.

This is no enforcement as long as it's just an alert. Those who want to follow speed limits can do that already, there is this new thing called speedometer that comes with every car. More electronic gadgets solve nothing but build infrastructure for EU dystopia that monitors everybody.

I advise you to vote with your feet as I have done. I suspect you’re a tech worker so it should be easy to find work across the globe.

I myself emigrated to Thailand and while Thailand isn’t perfect, for various reasons I feel more free here than in The Netherlands. Perhaps most of all since I pretty much can legally avoid paying much tax here and in my opinion taxes in The Netherlands are just too damn high.

There are legal speed limits. Drivers routinely ignore them. EU plans a system that automatically _alerts_ drivers when when they are exceeding the speed limit (something that essentially all sat nav do).

How dare they be so evil? Jeez.

That's just it - the limits are too low.

If it was such a useful feature, why people aren't using it already? And initially they wanted to make cars automatically slow down too, but thankfully that was thrown out. Till next time?

Mandatory breathalyzer is much more stupid.

> If it was such a useful feature, why people aren't using it already?

Similar things are used. For example, in the UK some insurance companies make an offer which depends on the driver installing a speed tracker and not violating the limit.

The argument "why hasn't it been done yet" is quite weak. It takes time for things to be put into law, and the relevance of this kind of intervention increases with the number of drivers on the road.

Whenever someone claims the law can't actually change people's behaviour for the better, I instantly think of the UK's plastic bag charge law in 2015, which quickly cut usage by 86%.

"Mandatory breathalyzer is much more stupid."

What about for convicted drunk drivers?

Would these measures be more acceptable for people who have already proven themselves untrustworthy?

Why do I have to pay for breathalyzer in my car if I don't drink alcohol nor ever had problems with it?

I'm not saying you do.

You are unhappy with the new law. I'm asking if you would find a targeted law more reasonable.

To give the parent to your comment some benefit of the doubt, some vehicles do have mandatory breathalysers fitted, but as far as I'm aware it's only commercial vehicles in certain sectors of the market (some buses and coaches, I know of, it's possible they're required somewhere in goods transport vehicles)

Some countries already allow convicted DUI to keep driving with aftermarket breathalyzers. IMO in some cases it's good as an optional replacement for the license suspension. If someone depends on their license that may be a good compromise to both not ruin someone's life and ensure public safety.

What about in addition to license suspension?

The suspension as punishment, the breathalyser as prevention of future incidents.

Yes that doesn't address the 'depending on your license' angle. but I'm not sure that should be a valid defence anyway?

Shall we demand hackers to never touch network-connected computer as prevention of future incidents?

I don't think life-long sentences is OK for all but most severe crimes. And a single DUI, especially on lower end of punishable spectrum, is not such.

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