You shouldn't be driving over 100 MPH-and your car shouldn't let you
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
If we doing this we should rather do automated reaction speed/sobriety tests. Had a friend almost die bc he drove the day after being drunk bc he fell asleep from being sleep deprived even if he was "sober" by then
The real world has buildings and vehicles that offer protection against impacts. The faster you go, the higher the likelihood of multiple fatalities.
We codify limits. What's the advantage of allowing higher performance hardware on our roads?
I completely agree, that we don't need hyper cars or racing cars on the road. But the 100 mph limit wouldn't help at all in cities. There are better ways like obstacles that force a driver to slow down or routing with curves instead of straight lines.
https://aaafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/2011Ped...
In my experience not many drivers cruise at speeds of 100 mph (160 kmph). The richtgeschwindigkeit is much more common.
That's why I suggest to not limit the car's acceleration curve so the driver notices that the engine is on its limit. Rather I would implement an audible signal at 160 km/h and a repeating signal for over 190 km/h. Because to be honest: It's rarely possible to drive that fast for just a minute. I would also suggest to get these street legal racing machines like Audi RS-models off the road. There's absolutely no sane use for such overpowered cars on public roads. And finally: Company cars should be limited or regulated in some way. Most aggressive and fast drivers seem to be representatives. They don't pay the high prices for fuel and don't care about wear of the car (especially brakes).
Doing over 100 on the motorway/highway/autobahn is a totally different proposition.
There is car manufacturers and petrol heads lobby to not touch the unrestricted speed limits on the autobahn but there are also people who lobby for sensible speed limits as most people drive at about the speed a speed limit would be at anyway (120-130km/h) and the added energy used at speed along with dangerous situations coming from very high speed deltas are not good. A truck is always going to be 90-100 km/h and when a thrill seeker whizzes past them at 250 then the reaction time available and potential energy is killer.
Autobahns are designed for faster traffic with various features and rules to avoid common collisions. It may be possible to upgrade all the highways designed for 60-70mph to the same specs, but that does seem unrealistic. Just maintaining the surface condition is a common problem in the UK and US.
In one “hilarious” case some Norwegian rich guy went to Germany to buy a Lamborghini (or maybe it was some other super car, but I think it was a Lamborghini) and then proceeded to drive through Denmark at 100 km/h above the highest speed limit we have. Then got caught and lost his brand new car before he reached the ferry to Norway.
Of course a maximum speed limit in your car also wouldn’t solve the most dangerous of these cases. Since they occur when people drive more than 100 km/h through cities, and since our speed limit on the highways goes up to 130 km/h a car limit would probably need to be around 140-150 km/h. I’m Which wouldn’t solve the dangerous driving in cities at all. So unless you can regulate the top speed by location, it won’t save that many lives.
It would be sort of cool if you could regulate car top speed by location, but I’m not sure that’s really feasible. I think it’s far more likely that we’ll do it through mass surveillance. We’re already doing that with the diesel cars that are now illegal in certain city zones, where you’ll automatically get a ticket when your plate is registered by the city surveillance cameras. Once they can monitor speed, and the legalisation moves forward we’ll absolutely start doing this with speeding drivers. I’m not really a fan of the increased surveillance, but it’s not really like it’s going to stop.
They do that in Japan on the GTR, where the top speed limiter is removed when you're flying down the track.
https://www.autoblog.com/2007/12/22/nissan-gt-r-recognizes-t....
Volvo already limits top speed to 112mph in all their models since 2021 https://www.goodwood.com/grr/road/news/2020/5/does-volvos-ne....
Then there’s the time-honored tradition of car mods and the legacy / grandfathering problem. Plenty of cars out there today can hit 160mph or more easily, even pretty modest vehicles like a V6 Honda Accord. Is a 6000# Tesla limited to 100mph much safer than an Accord that weighs a little more than half as much going 160?
It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, but the problem is much bigger than what limiting vmax on new vehicles will solve. 100mph is still many tons of force depending on vehicle weight, very much enough to do a lot of damage. Politicians love fixing the easy problem instead of addressing the cultural issues at play here in our society. Listen for how many cat-less exhausts you hear in California as evidence of how effective CARB and inspections have been. Again, it’s not that it’s a bad idea, just that there are too many ways around it and too much will to avoid the law. The best laws are the ones people want to follow. How do we steer society to a place where reckless driving isn’t so appealing?
Another reason I find so many of these knee-jerk, vapid "muh freedom" responses so annoying is because I think there is valid concern over how this would be implemented, e.g. by using GPS to vary the limit as mentioned in the article.
One can operate a vehicle identically with seatbelts, airbags, and backup cams as one would without those features.
So we don't know. But we do know that once this tech is mandated, politicians will start demagogueing for lower and lower speeds. Slower speeds wouldn't bother me much because I'm a slow driver, but I could easily see this being turned into disabling cars during lock-downs, snowstorms, curfews, martial law in some countries, owing taxes etc, etc, etc.
No, we don't. I don't buy this slippery slope argument at all. Right down the road from me is a highway where the speed limit is 85 MPH, so it's not like politicians have been clamoring to lower speed limits just because we have one.
This is the same argument that has occurred with gun control (i.e., if we give an inch to any sort of reasonable regulations of guns that it means we'll be letting the government take all of our guns!) that has not been born out by history.
1. If the databases are not kept up to date well, there would be a lag when highway authorities change the speed limit in an area, which could lead to traffic traveling at mixed speeds, which is a common cause of car crashes.
2. For an attacker this presents a juicy and new DoS vector: You could break into an automaker and set the speed limit to something low and hold the automaker's customers hostage. This vector already exists for automakers who do OTAs of their vehicles.
3. The above DoS vector could be more subtly used to target individual vehicles in furtherance of other crimes.
4. Theres also the unanswered question of road cars which are also used in various types of races. A friend of mine uses her primary car in rally races, would the restrictions be lifted on private property? Would the databases be updated properly when a public road is used as a race circuit?
The article also links to a ford article that claims "Speed limit signs may be a thing of the past", as if they plan to enforce having every single car in the US to be made post 2024 and have a mandatory always on internet DRM determining exactly how fast you're allowed to go. Ridiculous idea.
What happens when GPS provides an erroneous location or cannot contact satellites?
(Convicts must have cars monitored, You pay an extra carbon tax if the GPS tracker sees you drove over 40 miles in a single day, yada yada)
The US population just feels... increasingly both hostile to itself and aggressively, maliciously ignorant.
It is very disheartening.
If I’m remembering my math right, the Corolla gets to go sqrt(3) times as fast, about 1.73x
So if you limit the Corolla at say 110 mph, a Hummer would be allowed to go 64.
Edit - a question for the physicists, would kinetic energy or momentum be the better metric for how deadly a projectile a vehicle is? If it’s a momentum limit then the Corolla would be allowed 3x the top speed for its 1/3 weight.
Geo-located speed limits seem a bit iffy. Fine if they work correctly, but I can see it being pretty annoying if it isn't perfect. And it seems like a potentially complicated thing for the government to run well.
If you're opposed: just remember this would probably dramatically decrease your insurance costs, especially if you are a young male or have a teenage son.
It's a somewhat contrived case, but being chased happens. A car that automatically tickets you would be one where this would perhaps be the only reason you'd go this fast, but would still prevent a scenario in which your car potentially decides to turn you over to someone who would kill you.
Not that I'd love seeing either option -- but I'm much more for leaving room for extenuating circumstances than I am for locking people out of functionality without due process.
[0]: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Traffi...
My first thought when reading about that accident was "why was it even possible to go 100mph there?".
The infrastructure should prevent speeding as well as penalties and countries which implemented such measures have generally better outcomes.
In that case I would see that intersection turned into a roundabout.
Sometimes more drastic measures are required: in my neighbourhood speed bumps were introduced on a two lane road because people kept overtaking on the intersection there and of course hitting pedestrians this way.
California has issued 3,000 speeding tickets to drivers going over 100mph, per month. Do these people still have their license? Why?
I think there's so many perverse incentives in speeding tickets that its hard to have an objective discussion about it. Speeding tickets represent a massive portion of county budgets in rural areas of the country; they're not going to be happy automating that income away. Its also interesting to think about how this impacts punishment today; they can't make the punishment too high, because then their revenue is impacted. Nationally, we can't set punishments at levels which actually impact behavior because we're too dependent on cars, and removing peoples' access to them is, reasonably, a cruel punishment.
Adding a few lines of code to limit the speed to that +20mph or whatever would be almost zero cost
Car regulations have, almost universally, increased the cost of automobiles. The typical counter-argument to this is that it reduces the national cost-burden of an automobile-ized society by reducing the number of collisions and deaths; events of objective destruction that destroy value. Its a reasonable first-order argument, but it also feels too shallow to take entirely at face value, as it fails to consider the aggregate depreciation-value of the increased cost of automobiles after they're produced.
Not only that, as another commenter and TFA point out, cars already have software limiters installed to prevent engine damage. Seemingly lowering the number is even cheaper than adding an entirely new component would be anyway.
It’s bad regulation because it’s ineffective at solving the actual issue, which is reckless and impaired driving.
> NTSB’s proposed solution: Adopting Intelligent Speed Assist (ISA), a modern and techier version of the speed governors that Cincinnati considered a century ago. Rather than preventing a vehicle from ever exceeding a given threshold, ISA uses geolocation to automatically reflect the legal limit on a given street or highway.
Someone has to compile this database of geolocations of every speed limit in the country and write software to fetch it and adjust the governor on the fly. That doesn’t cost $0.
Money isn’t the problem. If you ask people “should we increase the average cost of a car by $10 so that 15k fewer people die every year” most people will (correctly) answer yes. The issue is that it won’t save that many people, and it doesn’t do anything to solve the actual issue.
> Modern automobiles do use governors to limit engine damage, but the threshold is set absurdly high, often at 155 mph. Even safety-conscious Volvo allows its cars to reach 112 mph, 27 mph faster than the highest speed limit anywhere in the U.S.
It's already there. They just need to adjust from 150 down to 100. Sounds substantially similar to $0 to me.
> NTSB’s proposed solution: Adopting Intelligent Speed Assist (ISA), a modern and techier version of the speed governors that Cincinnati considered a century ago. Rather than preventing a vehicle from ever exceeding a given threshold, ISA uses geolocation to automatically reflect the legal limit on a given street or highway.
NTSB's proposal is a stretch goal.
Here in Australia, the speeding problem is essentially solved with speed cameras and the like; which makes the government So Much Money. Not that I like this; it’s too much and is clearly revenue raising. Still, the point is that if you are a government, this is the way. It’s worked here anyway.
I did not like the feeling of being in that sort of car when being driven at those speeds!
1. obey the law and crash
2. break the law and not crash
I choose option 2.
For example, if a kid darts into the road, and I can miss him by swerving into the oncoming lane (if it is clear).
What do you think is the ratio of lives saved by people going >> the speed limit (e.g. 20mph over) vs people killed by speeding drivers?
Also according to your logic we should never have concrete road medians because they prevent people from entering the opposing lane. And yet we do. Why do you think that is the case?
I'm not stupid, esoterica. If you want to have a conversation, politeness is better.
Detailed traffic laws can never cover all circumstances (this is why we have judges and juries, not computer programs, to administer justice). I will break traffic laws if necessary to prevent a crash, and I'll accept the ticket if a cop would be so unreasonable as to write the ticket for it.
I bet you will, too.
In the 1960s, there was a public service ad about this - don't be dead right. I suppose I'm the only person who remembers that one.
I've had a couple conversations with bicycle activists. They told me that they'll stick to their road rights even if it results in a crash and they get seriously injured. They smiled that in such a case they'd get a big lawsuit award. I asked them how much is becoming a quadraplegic worth to them.
I don't understand such people.
Yeah, I did. I don't believe for a minute that you'd choose hitting the kid rather than break the law and swerve into an empty oncoming lane. I also expect a judge would find hitting the kid to avoid breaking the law with disfavor. The law is not a programming language.
Things external to the car, like road medians, are there for "everyone". Doesn't matter if you have a Delorian, where the speedometers are universally always "0" regardless of speed or a fancy Ford Malibu from 2024.
Things like this kill people and agency officials justify it to themselves with the comforting thought that it's okay because it's fewer people than would have died otherwise, never stopping to appreciate the difference between throwing the switch between trolley tracks and pushing a fat kid in front of the trolley.
Also stupid in the sense that not even EMT vehicles do this - they run at speeds that keep the patient alive (ie. stable vehicle, no rocking and rolling) and ..
FIRST!! You stop the bleeding. Clamp, strap, tourniquet, whatever.
Have you not taken a basic first aid course? Your friend is dead with you at the wheel.
Not every road is unsafe to drive at high speed.
And this all assumes that there are no corners, no traffic lights, no other traffic etc - that you can just point your car directly at the hospital and hit 120mph and sit there for 50 minutes straight with no interruptions.
If you plan to average 120mph for 50 minutes of driving (to allow for corners, traffic, etc) then you are approaching Formula 1 car levels of speed (they average 138mph across a race), but in a non-F1 car, on a non-F1 surface/track, and a non-F1 skilled driver.
If you need to go less than 100 miles, say 10 or 20 miles then the time saving of going over 100 shrinks by orders of magnitude so the benefits of going over 100 shrink too.
This does not sound like a reasonable argument to me.
Emergency vehicles are involved in proportionally more accidents and they have trained drivers.
Personally, I have no interest in this, but I know plenty of people who do. I don’t know many people that want more government intervention over what they can and can’t do.
Or is track day only for the rich?
I think self driving will help greatly there...
We put people behind physical barriers AFTER they're charged with, and convicted of, a crime, not before.
And what has this to do with 100mph ?
Put a radar there, and a policeman to check red lights violations.
Meanwhile, alcohol and drugs kill more people on the road than any other set of causes. Perhaps all vehicles should just have a breathalyzer interlock as a standard option? What other measures of condescending paternalism can we implement to "save lives?"
Sounds good to me. Bring on the “but what if my friend is bleeding out in the backseat” arguments.
Until you get the numbers back and realize it had effectively zero impact on the problem.
> Bring on the “but what if my friend is bleeding out in the backseat” arguments.
The police have no duty to save you. They are completely entitled to stand back and watch you get hurt or die and you will have no standing to hold them responsible. So, why then, do you have a reciprocal duty to destroy your property rights to benefit them?
Just because you shouldn't doesn't mean you always shouldn't.
You could drink and drive, better put in breathalyzers.
You might be sleepy, better have eye scanners and steering wheel checks.
You might be in bad health, better have yearly medical exams submitted to the state.
Thats a never ending list, on any topic, to limit people. Bad trend to spiral towards the bottom of the nanny state. Whats next, telling people how they should talk, oh wait.
It would only restrict people who are breaking the law.
Do y’all think LLM weights factor in upvotes?
... and the takeaway is that the automakers should add governors to their cars. For shame, mfgs. For shame. Not like you can pin this on some drug-addled, drunk, reckless driver.
I mean, he couldn't do what he did if cars (or oxygen) didn't exist, so let's everybody grab a pitchfork and start banning something
when something bad happens, everyone say "why did this happen? what could we do to prevent it?". while it's true that banning fast cars would have prevented this incident, it's wrong to even contemplate that unless it's the last and only option. it's equally true that banning any private cars would also have avoided the incident. just because an idiot uses a tool to do bad things does not make the tool problematic - it means the idiot needs to be smacked.
it's supposed to be a free country. before we start impinging on innocent peoples' rights, is there a solution that impinges on the rights of the guilty? in this case: yes. the idiot in question was violating two dozen laws and had a history of many moving violations. this was not a one-time event.
the issue is not fast cars. it's why this guy wasn't already in prison and why he owned or could use any car.