Intelligent speed assistance: everything you need to know | Hacker News Reader

Intelligent speed assistance: everything you need to know

autocar.co.uk

24 pointsSQL221926 comments

Autocar here starts by complaining that the "intelligent speed assistance" has been maligned as "speed limiters". But upon reading the article further, that's exactly what it is.

When a neutral party says "speed limiter" to me, I immediately think of the actual technology here.

When the article started out with "intelligent speed assistance", I thought this might be a cool feature that let my car go faster safely. At most, I thought the tech might be something that does increase safety by warning about sharp turns, but at least could give the car ability to handle faster speeds.

But on reading the article, it seems like there's nothing intelligent about it other than it's ability to read road signs and force you to slow down.

"Intelligent speed assistance" is indeed the Orwellian term. If the article wasn't written with such earnestness I would have thought it to be a parody.

Yeah, intelligent speed assistance would include things like:

Determine the speed limit, and: a) highlight the limit on the speedometer, b) allow cruise control to be set as an offset of the posted limit, c) notify when over the limit by some amount, d) coordinate with existing optional speed limits (sometimes tied to specific keys)

Also, intellegent speed assistance might help with surveying the actual speeds to get a better idea of safe speeds than posted limits.

This is just limiting speed by cutting the fuel.

It’s already each to survey actual speeds; a couple of those air-filled sensor lines stretched across the roadway at different intervals works fine.

I've seen "unofficial" speed limit signs put up by residents of a given location. They look exactly like official signs, and I imagine it's tricky to properly police this. I wonder if this system opens up an attack surface for bad actors to intentionally modify speed limits to either lower or higher than official ones.

Reminds me of the guy who managed to make Google Maps report a traffic jam by pushing a cart full of smartphones around [0], except this one affects your hardware by automatically cutting off throttle and doesn't require drivers to rely on an app.

Also, from the article:

> "How will I enjoy my recreational driving when ISA systems come into force? Same way I do right now: in slow old sheds that would only break the national speed limit if you pushed them off a cliff."

So it's pushing people who drive for fun to do so in older vehicles with correspondingly older safety technology. Interesting.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/google-maps-traffic-jam-99-s...

The attack surface was already there: people put up real-looking speed limit signs and it fools drivers. No extra technology is needed.

They may get better responses, and compliance, if this was instead billed as a pedal detent for “current speed limit please”. The current name just sounds Orwellian.

Basically like cruise control, but only when the gas pedal is in a certain position.

Bonus points if you have a dial for “speed limit + n” in the US, because if I tried to drive the speed limit all the time in my state I’d get run over.

Having pedal force increase at the speed limit seems like it'd be a sensible feature to have. It'd encourage not going over the limit while simultaneously not doing much to stop you if you really wanna. It'd make keeping the pedal balanced at the right point much easier too.

While we are at it, how about equipping all cars with a breathalyzer so if you have above normal alcohol levels the car won’t start?

If the speed limits are too low in places, they should be raised.

But many times my life has been endangered by a speeding car. There is always a trade off between too much policing and too little policing. I think that speeding has been tolerated for far too long. I think the world will be a better place if a scalable technical solution is implemented.

Lots of crying in the comments over an EU mandate which says in its opening pages that the limiter must be able to be disabled by the driver. If you don’t like it, just turn it off.

Lots of things start optional before becoming mandates.

The slippery slope is real.

Lots of "optional" things one would have to explicitly disable these days. It's never a persistent setting either. You are universally forced to turn these things off every time you get into the car and start it.

There’s no sign that you’ll be able to turn it off in the car ahead of you, though.

If you force people to manually turn it off every time you start the car (which is what the article states), it’s essentially mandatory. It wears people down to do so and they’ll just give up and accept the feature at some point. It’s an illusion of choice.

I have a feature in my car (2020 mazda) that attempts to read signs as you pass and determine the current speed limit, and I'd say that it's accurate 60-70% of the time but nowhere near 100%. Even if the technology was there, I'm not sure this would be a good idea, but until it is - it's definitely a bad idea.

That's pretty cool. Are you sure it's trying to read the signs, as opposed to consulting a pre-made map of speed limits at the current GPS location?

Most cars do this from cameras - mobileye has been selling this capability for a while as an OEM.

I'm pretty sure my two cars with map data have speed limits from that, but it's fairly spotty and they're both pay to update, so I'm not likely to update often. Some cars do it optically, though.

I think so - it changes right when you pass a sign

What a bunch of absolute trash. Especially when it's inevitably mandated to be permanently enabled in a few years. Amazing how the EU constantly finds new ways to run their subjects lives.

It takes a long time for societies to evolve and it is a gradual process. Implementing this in new cars now would mean a couple decades or more before it's ubiquitous. As the father of a young boy, I would be willing to make the sacrifice to know that by the time he's old enough to make stupid mistakes these protections would be in place on the road.

Allowing almost anyone to operate a multi-ton, extremely powerful machine at high speeds, that can kill people in a instant, and is indeed a leading of cause of death, is not a natural human right. The public road is already a highly regulated environment, as it should be. Traffic laws are not "running" anyone's life, that's just a reactionary sound bite. Future generations (if our civilization survives long enough) will look back at this era of automobile deaths and horrific accidents caused by human error as barbaric. In the long term, all cars will be autonomous and humans will not be allowed to drive themselves on public roads. Speed limiters, and other automated safety measures, are a logical step towards that future. The increased safety, in the long term, will allow legal speed limits to be safely increased.

Don't get me wrong, I don't live in the EU, and I do speed on the highway, but I'm not proud of it and I'm terrified of other drivers who speed (sometimes recklessly). As a start, a "generous" mandatory speed limiter (such as 50km/h OVER the legal speed limit) makes a great deal of sense. Someone doing 100km/h in a 50km/h zone, where children could be playing, is a heinous crime.

Human life is messy, and mandatory controls risk doing more harm than good.

To your exact "generous" example, a decade or so ago we suspected my great grandfather might be in trouble (didn't call his son at the normal time, couldn't be reached, wasn't home when we went to check), and we eventually found him nearly dead from hypothermia after he'd slipped trying to move a tree out of the road and couldn't get back in his truck. It was in the middle of nowhere and would've taken at least ten minutes just to drive somewhere that had some kind of landline or cellular connection to call an ambulance out, and we instead drove roughly 113km/h on a 48km/h road to get him to the hospital (limit was so low because it's super windy and steep, not because it's residential). We got him to the hospital 10-30 minutes faster than the soonest he would have been in an ambulance otherwise and more than an hour faster than how long it would have taken for the ambulance to arrive and get him hospital. I don't know if the extra time made the difference, but I wouldn't want to have to fight some kind of mandatory speed limiting if I had to do that again.

If it could be disabled (maybe even every time you start the vehicle) I'd be a lot more okay with the idea -- kind of like how traction control usually does what I want but once in awhile I need to disable it to get out of a hairy situation when it doesn't quite understand what's happening with a foot of snow and patches of ice on the ground.

Many cars (worldwide) already have the ability to configure a speed limit (among other settings) based on which key is used. So you could configure a speed limit for your son's key, while your key would be unlimited.

This is why I plan to move to Germany where the autobahns are unrestricted!

reminds me of this gem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAvQSkK8Z8U

TLDR - Associated with cars - "tech that can automatically curb your car’s speed to the prevailing limit"

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