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Comment by Johnny555 | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly, the car returned the (current?) speed:

Speed: 81 mph

I wonder if that, coupled with the GPS info (which wasn't included in the data returned, but I assume the car knows it) would be sufficient to issue a speeding ticket if the government had access to the data?

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I know in some jurisdictions at least you also need to identify the driver, because the ticket needs to be made out to whoever was speeding, which may or may not be the owner of the vehicle.

And some countries include a separate offence of "failing to identify the driver", with penalties usually more severe than the driving offence.

A few British politicians have found this out the hard way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Huhne

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/jan/29/labour-mp-fi...

I think this [1] Wikipedia article better covers the situation with Huhne.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Huhne

A former Australian federal court judge went to jail for two years for lying about who was driving his car when it incurred a speeding fine worth $77

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Einfeld#Criminal_convic...

Unless I'm missing something, both of these cases (and the case of the Australian judge a sibling commenter pointed to) has nothing to do with "failing to identify the driver" but all to do with straight up lying to the courts, i.e. perjury. The fact that they were speeding seems incidental.

Don't worry well have facial recognition for that soon enough

When speed cameras came about jurisdictions that wanted to use them simply changed their law to say that a photo/radar reading of the car speeding by the camera was prima facie evidence that the owner was responsible for the infraction.

Luckily it isn't in Tesla's interest to just hand this info over to the government en mass.

There are indeed some aspects of Arizona I absolutely love. Unfortunately the D's and R's here seem to collude enough to slowly strip away a lot of the protections AZ law used to provide.

It REALLY depends on your government.

In Michigan doesn't allow automatic speeding camera things that automatically issue tickets, while New York does.

Going off how Michigan operates then no, the GPS info wouldn't be enough.

In another government such as China the answer is very likely "Yes".

Your cellphone already has all of this information too. Google Maps will tell me both my current speed and the road's speed limit while driving with navigation on.

But how would they know who to ticket? Just because your car is moving, doesn't mean you're the one driving it. If they cannot prove who was operating the vehicle at the time of infraction, they cannot issue a ticket.

That's not true, red light cameras have no problem issuing fines to the vehicle owner.

Yes they do. In many jurisdictions, if you are willing to perjure yourself (or are innocent), you can sign an affidavit that you were not driving the vehicle. Then it is up to the authorities to press the case based on quality of the video evidence.

IMO it's a silly hack. The fine should go the vehicle owner, who is responsible for pursuing recompense from the person the lent the car to (or file a theft report, or whatever).

Yeah, in our city a few years ago, a lawsuit was brought that even with camera pictures/video, it can't be proven the vehicle owner was driving the car and so all the red light camera tickets in process were thrown out and the cameras were deactivated. So definitely depends on jurisdiction.

May I ask what city you live in?

Which is why they're a terrible idea, usually implemented out of sheer greed for passive income with no actual police work.

Not to mention the increase in accidents, which it'd be ironic were there a class action lawsuit holding ATS, Redflex and the other companies responsible.

In many places red light cameras ticket the owner of the vehicle as a parking violation,(presumably for having you car in the intersection when the light was red?) whereas typically the driver of the vehicle is ticketed by the officer for a moving violation like speeding or running a light. My memory on this is pretty old though, laws may have changed and it may be location dependent.

Yes, but they take a picture of the car.

What if you car is being toed by a speeding truck (or on a trailer) ?

Then you could dispute the ticket, and presumably the fact that it's being towed would be visible in the photo.

There is usually a picture of the car along with a time and date of the incident. You would just simply appeal it and say that the car is clearly on a trailer and that the truck pulling the trailer is at fault.

That doesn't seem to matter. In DC we have speed cameras everywhere and it doesn't matter whether your face is visible in a photo, the ticket will be issued to the plate and must be paid by the owner regardless of who was driving the car.

It's not a traffic offense, at least. While still annoying, I'll take that any day over the alternative. $70 civil penalty vs $150 fine + $70 court costs + increased insurance premiums.

As a side note, it does feel like my due process rights are being violated when I have to deal with this. You can't go in front of a judge, but rather can go argue the ticket in some local government office.

In Alberta, the fine is for owning a speeding car, kind of like a parking ticket. The rationale is that you are responsible for who you lend the car to. It is a civil rather than criminal penalty, so no license points, but no getting out of it either. Rental car companies challenged it and lost (though you can be sure they will pass the cost on to you).

But the real rationale is: let’s blame someone that’s easy to blame instead of figuring out who’s actually responsible.

Germany has photo-radar, but can only issue a ticket to the driver.

Possibly that’s related to some of their history, I’m not sure.

Though they do issue voluntary “caution” money tickets to the owner at a discount to make it go away without identifying the driver.

I believe in the Netherlands they will send a ticket to the owner. The owner then has to pay the ticket or provide the info of the driver.

Same here in Australia.

The fine goes to the vehicle owner not the driver. This is why if you get fined by an automated speed camera or red light camera on a rental car, the rental company pay the fine and charge it back to you - with admin fees.

If it's a physical ticket on the car (parking, speeding, etc), you can pay it before the rental company ever hears of it and avoid those admin fees.

Some insurance companies are already doing this I think where they attach things to your car and if you stay under the speed limit you get discounts on your payments

There are also companies like The Flow that offer that data directly from mobile devices via an app.

MetroMile does this with an OBD-II device... their niche is insurance for low-mileage vehicles, and they track your mileage with a dongle device that must always be plugged in.

Seems like a huge information asymmetry, though. Anyone who's ever dealt with an insurance claim knows that they find any nitpick to get out of payments... having an insurance provider that can say "actually we don't owe you anything because according to our black box, you were 2 mph over the speed limit therefore you were negligent" seems like it defeats the purpose of having insurance.

I like the idea of more accurate pricing based on actual (low) usage, but I don't like that it gives them a disproportionately larger surface area for their lawyers to find technicalities that gets them out of paying claims. When the tollbooth transponders came out, they explicitly said "this will never be used to issue speeding tickets" even though all the data was there... I don't believe MetroMile makes any similar promise.

Liability insurance exists for covering even when you are liable.

I wonder... Could you spoof that device? It doesn't seem all too hard to- the ODB-II interface is pretty well documented.

Yeah, there's some reddit posts about doing it to the Progressive Snapshot device. But it being an insurer, you'd potentially be on the hook for insurance fraud, which doesn't carry a light penalty...

Anyone who's ever dealt with an insurance claim knows that they find any nitpick to get out of payments

"Everyone" says that, but I haven't found it to be true. Progressive fixed my car without any hassle (they paid nearly $5K to replace a door and fender and repaint the side of the car after someone tried to pry open the door). I also made a claim against Geico when a USPS truck hit me, again, trouble free, they paid the claim (minus my deductible) quickly and it took 18 months to get the USPS t

My sister lost her house to a fire and said that her insurance company (Allstate maybe) was super easy to deal with.

I wish I had your experiences in such clear-cut cases. I had to perform an independent investigation to get the insurance company to honor my side of the story in my last car claim, and relatives are dealing with a nightmare of a home insurance story that's looking like the insurance company is going drop them because of the complications involved.

In my experience, everyone is just trying to minimize their cash outflows. Incident claims are a zero-sum game, and if someone gets more or better information, that comes at the expense of someone else.

No need to worry about MetroMile, those dongles they distribute aren't reliable at all.

Source: Me, after paying hundreds of dollars because the "signal was lost" for over a month, billed at the daily max rate, while their emails about it went to spam.

In my country any device that would be giving fines has to be periodically checked every month by the authorities and made unmodifiable without oversight.

Probably not if there is a +/- of 10% error rate.

If you are manufacturing a vehicle/speedometer in 2019 with a 10% margin of error, I'd argue that was "not fit for purpose".

I left Australia in 2006, but even before then, the government had altered the statutes on speeding from the old model - 10% margin of error, to a flat 3kph(2mph) due to "increased accuracy in manufacturing".

They probably use GPS? If not, then just get bigger tires.

Speedometers measure speed by counting wheel rotations and multiplying them by the circumference. There's at least a few percent inherent error as circumference is going to vary with what tyre is fitted and how worn it is.

F1 cars, and I believe now high end sports cars use a differebt system that's basically how an optical mouse works. They image the road underneath the car and measure it moving past. This gives turning in addition. If you watch an F1 night race you can see a glow on the ground under the nose - that's the illuminator for the sensor.

There are also Ka-band Doppler radar systems used for sensing speed on the vehicle (exactly like how a radar gun works). You mount it on the vehicle to point to the ground at an angle and then connect it to a speedometer. Accuracy is usually within 1-3% up to 300mph.

I believe the sensor in F1 is actually measuring the ride height of the vehicle.

In some jurisdictions the law says that the car speedometer must show a higher speed than the correct one (as long as tyres aren't above the correct pressure), so that the driver can "trust" the speedometer to avoid them a speeding ticket. On my car 140 km/h on the speedometer corresponds to 128-130 km/h on the GPS.

They would have to verify beforehand how accurate the speedometer is.

A car's self reported speed is not accurate enough - for example if you slip on gravel or ice, the reported speed would momentarily be higher.

Or if you are braking it will be lower.

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