New cars will stop drivers from speeding under European laws
drive.com.au
drive.com.au
But that's just the title of an Australian website.
In the article, and in the actual law, this is just about a *warning* to the driver, that can optionally be coupled with the cruise control, and that *can be overridden* by the driver.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_speed_assistance#I...
Basically all cars manufacturers today already have that technology. What this law means is that the car maker can no longer make this system an overpriced option when selling the car.
Then they make it increasingly harder to disable.
Then they make it mandatory.
Surely everyone who has experienced abusive changes in software can see that pattern from a mile away?
They aren't going to roast the frog, but instead boil it very slowly...
What this is is just adapting an already extremely regulated field to the new technologies.
Road safety and regulations has massively improved the safety of cars in the last few decades, therefore saving many lives. And yet, car driving is still one of the most dangerous method of transport, causing countless of fatalities every year.
Speed limits have always had a discretionary factor in them. A freedom of human judgment, if you will.
And indeed not being able to drive at all seems like it would fit in with the whole green globalist agenda anyway, so the slope is definitely slippery.
Edit: downvoting won't hide the truth, bootlickers.
If this law were to enforce the speed limit by enforcing it in the motor control system there would still allow for unlimited speed on those stretches.
Your freedom to go faster than the speed limit also interferes with other freedoms btw. for example the health of people who live close to roads, the bodily integrity of people who might fall victim to the accidents caused by it etc.
If we build the roads correctly (e.g. like in more modern european places, many places in the Netherlands) speed limits become less relevant, because the shape of the street itself will limit how fast any sane person would go (not to speak of speed bumps).
So if you find yourself constantly enforcing speed limits, maybe there is an impedance mismatch between the way your road feels and the limit you slapped onto the traffic sign?
The obvious solution is to change the road, which might also come with added benefits (better for pedestrians, people on bicycles, therefore better revenue for local shops, restaurants and cafes etc).
Quite frankly I'd have no problem if my car enforced a speed limit, if the speed limit matches the street. Going 30 in a narrow (and I mean european narrow) street feels totally appropriate. Going 30 in what could be a highway not so much.
If all of this is there you can't just ride 50 km/h through there because it just feels wrong. Of course this is an example where we go from a limit of 50 to a limit of 30, but similar ideas exist for going from 70 to 50 etc.
However speed limits make sense from an environmental perspective. The difference between 100 and 130 is quite a lot of petrol.
Given the fact that air resistance is increasing quadratically with speed, that fast cars are loud, that accidents cost everybody in a socity time and money and that we have even more to expect in form of climate change not having a speed limit seems like a very radical political position. It doesn't seem radical, because it has been "normal" for a long time, but it is forcefully irrational.
Nothing against a little bit of irrationality. I am jumping into the sea or lakes from cliffs, bridges and cranes. But this is a danger to myself and not to others. Also I check beforehand how deep the water is.
that said the problem is, according to my observations, is that the German highways are full, there are more cars, so it's harder to go at almost any speed. so yes, it's more stressful.
(and just to mention something else stressful on German highways: Hochzeit Korsos! we had the pleasure to see one very close this year on the ring around München)
More anecdotally, my SO was commuting on the A2 for about a year. She saw the aftermaths of (minor) accidents basically every day and was the first car not to collide in a pile up twice.
(To be fair, most accidents on the A2 happen on that stretch around Gütersloh iirc.)
[1] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Verkeh...
I have the feeling that the politics works like this: A lof of people are speeding on that road, so let's just lower the speed limit. Real consequence is that now everybody is speeding.
Same with construction works: 30km/h. Even in the weekend when nobody is working there. So basically a free road and you have to go 30km/h. Nobody does that of course. I know a buddy of mine once did that to be funny, and we got passed by a scooter. Huge line of cars behind us. Crazy.
But besides that: reducing speed from 90 to 70 is most likely not for safety and more about the noise pollution. But i guess you don't care about that, as you're only driving through
Is there a right to break the law?
https://www.drive.com.au/news/bugatti-la-voiture-noire-for-7...
https://www.drive.com.au/news/chinese-flying-car-begins-test...
https://www.drive.com.au/news/suv-driver-charged-more-for-tr...
Now, I have cherry picked them in the sense that they stood out to me from their more typical motoring news or promotional material which makes up most of their content. So I don't think they are inherently worthless but they are certainly pretty low on the journalistic effort side of things.
The one thing speed limiters would be good for is preventing extreme speeding, like this drunk dickhead who drove at 148 km/h on a small street with a limit of 50 km/h and killed 5 people including himself:
https://mothership.sg/2022/06/tanjong-pagar-crash-coroners-i...
Then again, the BMW in question had also been extensively and mostly illegally modded, so any sort of limiting system would almost certainly have been disabled in the process.
Screw these features.
It's not like it needs to slam on the brake, it just needs to disengage acceleration past a certain speed. This isn't new grounds for tech and it is _currently_ deployed on our streets.
I'm not sure what the panic over this is, if anything this is a good thing - why should passenger vehicles go 200+ km/h anyways? Why isn't a more reasonable limit imposed, for cars that spend 99% of their time in an urban centre? What actual road is engineered to even support that kind of speed?
I don't see the difference, they're both valid reasons to reduce speed.
> The ISA regulation provides four options for systems feedback to the driver, from which car manufacturers will be free to choose from:
> • Cascaded acoustic warning
> • Cascaded vibrating warning
> • Haptic feedback through the acceleration pedal
> • Speed control function
https://road-safety-charter.ec.europa.eu/resources-knowledge...
Also: your motor/brakes are likely already controlled by software. Whether a speed limit is bolted onto that software or not doesn't make a lot of difference.
No, there’s no requirement to connect the ISA system to the brakes or throttle
It's going to be like the auto start/stop button on new vehicles: you can turn it off, but it'll always be on whenever the car is turned on again.
> it shall be possible to switch off the system; information about the speed limit may still be provided, and intelligent speed assistance shall be in normal operation mode upon each activation of the vehicle master control switch;
To add, the same system will be required for AEB:
> 4. Advanced emergency braking systems and emergency lane-keeping systems shall meet the following requirements in particular:
> the systems shall be in normal operation mode upon each activation of the vehicle master control switch;
GPS & internet, on the other hand, is a great combo for tracking people.
And you might not be surprised, that children dying in traffic accidents does happen.extremely frequent. But forget the children, this also infringes on rights of regular people like me. Your right to drive around 2 tons of steel and plastics don't outweigh my right to not get killed by any stretch of the imagination.
Tracking is a different issue sure, but there is nothing in this problem that relies on tracking. You need to read the current map data and the position of the car via GPS. You need to write nothing (and given the privacy laws in Europe, I don't really see why we would).
This should apply to GM, Ford, Stellantis, Tesla, Rivian, and Lucid, as all of them offer some sort of app functionality for seeing the location of your car.
I'm not saying that this isn't a privacy overreach and I think there are other things we can do to limit speeds (road design, etc.), but I think there's a reasonable balance to be found here.
For planes it will depend on whether you're crossing a border or not. Sometimes you get ID checks on domestic flights but that's because of airline policies (ie: fraud, insurance) rather than internal border control.
Of course it is required in Europe. Where it is not required, you are already known. For example, if you live in Berlin you have no possible hope of getting to Brussels to attend a protest without every movement you make being put into a database.
In America, we do still have one method of transportation which is not entirely watched - if your car doesn't broadcast its GPS location. Of course there are cameras everywhere, but it is possible to visit a lover or a brothel or whatever without being tracked and blackmailed if you take proper precautions. You? You have no hope. Don't ever think about meeting a lover if you want to run for office one day.
The only people who can run for office in a state with no privacy are the people with access to erase their data from the database.
But of course, we should give up this one method of obfuscation of our movement -- because we might be speeding in the car. If we did so we would be in a complete prison.
That's just outright wrong.
On the last dozens of flights (it may be well in the 100s) within the Schengen area I hardly ever had to show id. And if so it was due to airline policy and checked at the gate.
You badge in automatically by scanning your boarding pass into the secure transit area and then once again fully automatically at the gate.
If you're admitted to the flight by ground staff on airports without automated gates they hardly ever check your id.
Things like ABS, radar controlled cruise control for distance, blind spot mirrors, auto levelling mirrors are all fine in my book, even heads up display for speed. Blind spot mirrors should be regulated as a requirement on all new vehicles.
The connected GPS’s, mobile connections, digital touch displays all seem a backwards step, especially the new thing manufacturers are doing by installing hardware but soft locking the feature until you pay extra.
If you want privacy and freedom, you are free to walk or ride a bicycle unidentified. Which is fine as there is essentially no risk of killing people.
In Texas at least the speed limit is "whatever is safe" (you have to obey posted signs but you also have an obligation to drive faster or slower as safety demands it, as can be proven in court)
https://rislone.com/blog/general/does-my-car-have-a-black-bo...
"If your car is a model from this century, there's a fair chance you do indeed, have a black box fitted somewhere within it. Black boxes have been in some of the major American car brands, like Buick, Chevy and Cadillac, since all the way back to 1994. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been using them to collect car accident data since early in the 2000s. If your car is from 2013 or later, you are almost guaranteed to have a black box. Less than 5 percent of new cars came without one in 2013, and they are mandated in all new vehicles since 2014."
I sure hope they mean decelerate...
[1] https://www.clevelandmetroschools.org/cms/lib/OH01915844/Cen...
“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.”
https://road-safety-charter.ec.europa.eu/resources-knowledge...
Source?
I was addressing the title of the post: "New cars will stop drivers from speeding...".
They won't stop them - they will inform them through various means that they are speeding.
Instead of focusing on innovation and competition in the global market, Europeans are busy legislating their freedoms away.
Speeding falls under the "expedient" category of crimes: it's been illegal this entire time, but selectively enforced for practical reasons. Nobody wants to live in a society where a sufficient number of police are chartered to universally enforce speeding laws, so this seems like a very reasonable solution.
(What you're describing has nothing to do with speeding under the law, which doesn't care whether different states have different maximum speeds. Speeding isn't a Federal crime, and when we're talking about it the sole thing we're talking about is the individual State laws that describe speeding in the US.)
Perhaps we'll never have as many nobel prizes per capita, or as many millionaires, but I quite enjoy things being regulated in favour of the average citizen.
From deanonymization in crypto to Corona pass and tight border control and lockdowns people are being treated as the lowest common denominator - terrorists, money launderers and criminals.
- Richard Hamming
I suppose if the end result was that speed limits got adjusted up 5-10 mph to match the speed of the road it would be fine. I doubt this would happen in general, and I know it wouldn't happen universally.
Or you know, cars will just go the speed limit, 10 years from now and you won't even remember your brain simulated a shitty PID controller to hit some speed number subject to your irrational whims.
That's a couple things:
1. Not based on any actual design criteria for the road
2. Assumes that 85% of drivers are somehow more knowledgeable than the engineers who are supposed to be designing our roads and transportation.
The claim that you should be always able to go 5-10mph above the limit seems to be a mythos invented in and ingrained in the fabric of the American psyche. Better approaches exist than to just pick a popularity consensus from a sample of random drivers in a study (who are predisposed to going faster, often because the study is done before full levels of traffic set in).
[0] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/7/24/understanding-...
I think you're misinterpreting the parent commenter. They said that, in the U.S., speed limits are almost universally slower than the natural (i.e. prevailing) speed of traffic by 5-10 MPH, and so everyone driving at the prevailing speed of traffic is inevitably exceeding the posted speed limit by a bit.
That is definitely true, at least if you're not in the rightmost lane of traffic sandwiched between semis and box trucks. 75-80 MPH in 70 MPH zones is common, and it's not unusual to see people driving 85+ MPH.
As an observation I'd agree. However, my impression of the parent commenter was that they implied that 5-10mph over the speed limit is the correct way to drive. Were that true, why wouldn't we just set the limit anyways? How did that limit get chosen?
Again, this goes back to the 85th percentile - the ways in which we decide how fast to go on a road or street are wrong. Of course, there's two things going on in this thread:
- Using tech to warn / limit drivers from being able to speed over an agreed upon limit.
- Engineering our roads so that the intended speed matches the prevailing speed of traffic.
Now I'm more in the second camp on this one than the first, I'll admit, but I don't think that we should just sit by and accept "some people speed, therefore we should all go faster" as a given. I have definitely witnessed people going 85+ MPH, especially if you're on an interstate far away from any city. However, this is not the norm and not really where the tech in TFA is going to be deployed.
Either way, the issue I take is with moralizing going faster than the speed limit. You might say it's the flow of traffic, but that just smells like justifying something that most drivers already want to do (go faster), instead of understanding the action (speeding) and its effect on the environment around us (increased danger, increased fuel consumption, increased noise pollution, etc).
And speeding might not be that bad, many of them seem outdated or plain wrong, to the point where it's safe to go 10-20km/h faster, and in some places ridiculous not to go faster.
I had to do this multiple times passing RVs while on a road trip this weekend.
Also why is it safer?
To me a predictable speed would be safer.
Because you spend less time and less distance in the "wrong" lane.
Differential speed kills.
Operating an emergency vehicle
Or according to this site maybe >20% https://www.mpgforspeed.com/
People who speed don’t really mind the gas prices. Because Speeding is like paying $1.20 extra per gallon in CA
A more meaningful comparison would be with an airplane (small Cessna, big airliner, whatever). Do you think these airplanes should automatically steer away from protected airspaces?
Besides, modern planes have tons of automation that can take control of it, from simple things like preventing it from stalling to more complicated things like avoiding flights into terrain or automatically landing the aircraft at the nearest airfield.
As it is, I find maintaining 40km/hr difficult, so I tend to engage the cruise control. But that's pretty painful. I'd much rather it just did it for me. It already shows the speed limit on the dash display, so it'd be pretty simple to hook that up to the cruise control.
And sure, it'd be good to have an override for when something's screwy (ie. roadwork, or the navigation maps are out of date, or whatever). But 99% of the time this would make my life better.
It's a bit like cruise control. I like not having to constantly monitor my speed.
Now think about it that way: that car you bought, in which way did you buying that car also produce revenue for the state? Right, even more taxes. The state might also have already invested into your life, e.g. in the form of public education. And we are not speaking about health system, damages to streets and infrastructure, firefighters having to clear the road, firefighters having to go to therapy to deal with the trauma of the sight you gave them etc.
It makes zero sense for the state to pick a few speeding tickets over what is a chain of bad (potentially life-long) cost.
> While the law does recommend drivers be able to switch off ISA “when a driver experiences false warnings or inappropriate feedback as a result of inclement weather conditions, temporarily conflicting road markings in construction zones, or misleading, defective or missing road signs,” it doesn’t make it a requirement.
> Receive notifications that your volume should be turned down when you've reached the recommended 7-day audio exposure limit.
> Due to regulations and safety standards, headphone notifications can't be turned off in certain countries or regions.
https://road-safety-charter.ec.europa.eu/resources-knowledge...
Speed limits are stuck at 100km in Australia and have been for decades - despite cars introducing anti-lock breaking, predictive breaking, anti-rollover technology, lane assist and so on.
Cars are now much much safer, and yet speed limits outside of cities have not changed to reflect this. If the government wants to introduce speed limiters on all cars, they also need to re-examine speed limits - especially outside of urban areas.
They're largely much bigger now and carry more kinetic energy and they're more of a danger to everyone around them.
And braking technology really hasn't advanced significantly compared to velocity squared.
Human reaction time also hasn't improved one bit and has largely gotten more and more distracted and worse.
With fatal accidents rising, I don't understand how the conclusion is that everything is so much safer than ever and that we need to be raising speed limits. I must not be blessed with good enough counterintuitive thinking skills.
A few years ago, they considered a speed limit not for safety, but for the environment.
Another thing is that a modern car is not much safer in adverse conditions. When it snows or rains, things get dicey.
For whatever reason this feels like an especially significant step on the path towards increasingly excessive control over individuals and it makes me very sad that it's finally happening.
- disable start-stop system (that shit is dangerous!)
- put it to sport mode
- and now: disable speeding alarm
It starts to feel like I'm starting a fighterjet with all those buttons before takeoff.
Good thing I still have my motorcycle :)
Next, they will require a meter on your neck to charge you for air.
If I can't control a vehicle how I must outside of what's "permissible" because computers or artificial governors decide "what's best" for me when life and safety are at risk, then there's no way in hell I'm going to buy such a deathtrap. I can drive 140+ mph no problem in the right vehicle setup and maintained correctly under ideal, controlled conditions, but I absolutely don't trust ~95% of any else to.
I know enough computing power with LIDAR, optical cameras, thermal cameras, and MMWRADAR combined with specialized ML-CV can potentially (distant future) safely drive a vehicle faster than any human ever could, but we're nowhere near reliable, high-speed FSD.
Do the politicians really want to fight that fight for a few bucks when they can just tax us?
Things like this take away not only freedom but also normalise and encourage a condition of continuous subservience. Those in power want everyone to live a sterile, "healthy" life under their control, one with neither risk nor personal freedom.
Commute is supposed to be efficient, boring and predictable. Not a thrill ride, there are sport tracks for that.
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1310&dat=19800605&id=...
40,000 highway deaths per year, but its vitally important to keep in mind that one guy that escaped an erupting volcano over 40 years ago.
Why 150km/h and not 40km/h? Are you too impatient to drive 40km/h even though it could save lives?
No one has accepted anything, certainly not the increasing number of dead pedestrians from ever larger cars. You surely recognize the massive moral hazard.
People die all the time on roads it’s true. Enforcing a zero tolerance policy for speeding wont stop that. It will have many unintended consequences.
In most Europe, highway speed-limits are between 110km/h and 130km/h [0] give or take 40km/h to 20km/h to get out of a dangerous overtake and 150km/h should be more than enough for most cases.
Notice I added (consistently) for clarity, there are very rare cases where one needs to accelerate, but I find it very hard to justify a car going almost twice the highway speed limit for 30 minutes non stop.
[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Highway_speed_limits...
(leaving aside legality or safety)
"Come up with some reasons why people wouldn't want to drive fast" is trite, boring, I would have ignored it.
Edit to clarify: "Why not" in my reply isn't "Why not drive fast", it's "You say there is no rational reason, why not? Here's one".
And this is how the frog boils slowly. You have to push back when others try to decide what you need.
There are far too many long stretches of open highway with very light traffic that can easily handle speeds several tens of miles per hour over the posted speed limits. Locals and long-haulers routinely speed down these stretches, slowing down for the towns and then speeding up again once you are through.
This feature - allowing the car to manage vehicle speed, acting as a backseat driver will not only be annoying but will be a nonstarter for many people out here.
I personally will never knowingly buy a vehicle that could override any of my driving decisions in real time or that would nag me with automated messages. I am a trained practitioner of defensive driving techniques since one former employer required all drivers to take classes. I can use those skills to understand real-time highway conditions better than any pre-programmed algorithm ever will.
I don't need an algorithm to babysit me or to back seat drive for me.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200923-why-arrogance-...
If you disagree with my post because you disagreed with my position that an algorithm will not be able to out-perform a live driver who has been trained to observe real-time conditions so as to minimize the possibility that they will become part of someone else's malfunction on the highway then let's discuss that.
If you believe that these vehicles will be embraced by buyers in Texas or other places with long stretches of open highway where it is safe for drivers to drive faster than the posted speed limits then let's discuss that.
If you just think I'm some kind of coal-rolling redneck, F-650 with truck nuts driving dumbass because I mentioned Texas then you are wrong on everything except possibly the dumbass part and you should just admit your bias and work hard to avoid being so judgemental.