And then there’s courts. If courts can force drunk drivers to add ignition interlocks to their cars, they can throttle the engines of chronic speeders too.
> Apart from the speed cap, every Volvo car will now also come with a Care Key, which allows Volvo drivers to set additional limitations on the car’s top speed, for example before lending their car to other family members or to younger and inexperienced drivers.
[1] https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressrele...
I’m not saying it happens often, but I’ve had times when driving on the motorway when I simply need to accelerate past the normal legal limit to get some distance or swap lanes safely to get away from some one behind me or next to me.
You should start funeral planning if you buy the kid a Chevrolet Spark, with its 0-60 of 11 seconds and top speed of 90mph.
I didn’t use any hyperbole about the fastest car, with highest acceleration, I was merely pointing out that a hard cap at 65mph is (imo) a silly idea as there’s many reasons you would need to accelerate beyond that to get out of an unsafe situation.
I could maybe advocate for a happy medium here, something like a black box given by your insurance company (they already do), insurance premiums for larger, more powerful vehicles being higher (they already are), traffic calming measures, or speed cameras (already exist) and punishments for speeding such as fines, points, bans or additional speed awareness courses (all already exist). If you’ve any additional input here, other than ‘plan a funeral if you don’t limit your kids speed’ then I’d appreciate the discussion as these things clearly don’t fix all the problems that we encounter on the road, but they certainly prevented me from being a dumb ass on the road when I was a teenager, and still manage to.
I trust you weren't using "devil's advocate" as a way to say something while trying to avoid direct criticism.
If 65 mph is too low, then what maximum speed do you think is appropriate? 70? 90? 120? The local maximum speed limit + 15mph?
If you think any artificial limit is intrinsically less safe (bear in mind that high-end cars are already artificially limited to 155 mph), then the same logic says that, if price is not any issue, it's always safer for a kid to drive a faster car with good acceleration - the faster and more powerful, the safer it is.
If you think a maximum of 90mph is too slow to be safe, what do you say to parents who buy their kid a car with a max speed of 90mph? Do you tell them you think that care is unsafe and they should get a faster car if they can afford it?
(This reminds me of the Swedish A-Tractor, which lets 16+ year olds drive certain vehicles so long as they are limited to a max of 30km/h, including through electronic limiters. According to you, that's more unsafe than allowing faster speeds. Strange that the Swedish government feels otherwise.)
Your examples were all on the motorway. I presume a parent wanting the 65 mph speed limit will also want the teen driver to stay off the interstate, motorway, or other highway. If the kid is only supposed to drive on roads with a max 45 mph speed limit, then a car limit of 65 mph should be just fine, yes?
Many US states limit school buses carrying students to 55 mph, even on the interstate. Buses also have lower acceleration than a car. From what I can tell, the consensus by the relevant authorities is that raising the limit to better match the flow of traffic is more dangerous because of the increased deadliness of any crashes.
How is it that the driver of a 15-passenger school bus is able to handle restrictions you think are so unsafe that you couldn't handle them?
I don't understand the point of your last paragraph. Just because those things helped keep you from being a dumb-ass driver as a kid doesn't mean that another tool - a speed limiter - can't be an additional useful parental restriction on a beginning driver. For one, unlike everything you listed, it does not require third-party involvement.
To answer your first question, I'd say 90mph is probably the most you'd need to use in pretty much all circumstances to safely overtake or maneuver out of a bad situation. If we need to enforce a limit, I'd be erring around that number, personally. The current 155mph limiter that we get in the EU is overkill for road cars outside of Germany, unless there's other places with unrestricted public roads.
I don't recall saying any artificial limit is less safe, I suggested a 65mph limit would be less safe.
I think parents buying a 90mph max car are doing nothing wrong, as that isn't artificially limited to 65mph and would still have the acceleration potential to move out of the way when going the speed limit, albeit slower than some higher spec'd cars would. My first car was a Mazda 2, with no limits on it. It's top speed is 106mph according to Google, and I probably saw 90 once or twice within 4 years of having it.
I'm not sure comparing what we're talking about to tractors is a fair argument - we can drive tractors on the road at 14 in the UK, they don't go on motorways, nor are they the same type of vehicle as a car. I think this goes for a bus as well, it's not only a professional vehicle, with a different class of licence, but they are significantly larger, bright colours, lots of signage stating their restrictions (at least in the UK).
Yes, if the car is only used on the 45/50mph roads then I'd agree 65mph would suffice. If the parent limited to 65, and requested their child didn't go on the highway should we start including GPS limiters as well just incase your kid thought they knew better? It seems like people can't trust their kids anyway in this discussion, as you're wanting to set a limiter on their car, so may as well include some measure to stop them even trying in the first place.
Not particularly sure of your focus on buses here, as I said they're a totally different class of vehicle and clearly don't accelerate the same as personal vehicles for many reasons. Public liability, efficiency, comfort, safety and longevity for starters, and I reckon physics probably comes into play somewhere.
The limiter can be another deterrent, or parental restriction, I just think it's a potentially dangerous one, personally.
Your devil's advocate position was "if you limit the speed for your teen and then need to accelerate to get out of a dangerous situation, what will happen" further clarified as "You should probably start funeral planning anyway if you can’t trust your kid in a vehicle without artificially limiting their speed.".
Had the original limit been 70 mph, I assume you would have said the same thing, as your comment didn't suggest any artificial limit was reasonable.
Hence my devil's advocacy.
> we can drive tractors
While the name comes from farm tractor use some 50 years ago, a Swedish A-tractors is not farm tractor like what you are thinking of. See for examples https://www.curbsideclassic.com/automotive-histories/regiona... and https://www.archivish.com/epas-and-a-tractors-the-slow-swedi... for examples. They can be can be a regular car modified to limit the speed, take out the suspension, shorten the length, and have max two seats. See those links for some images.
> with a different class of licence ...
If you got the same training, does that mean there would be fewer situations where you need to exceed 65 mph on the motorway? Since you asked what could make things safer, it sounds you think additional mandatory training would help.
> should we start including GPS limiters as well just incase your kid thought they knew better?
No clue. That's a far more complicated question which I am ill-informed to answer.
I can make some obvious comments: Exposing the controls for an existing and well-tested speed limiter seems a lot easier than creating an entirely new geofence input system and adding GPS, to say nothing of the more complicated set of failure conditions. The geofence mapper needs to stay up-to-date because road change, so someone has to pay for that service. Most parents who want GPS tracking can already ask their teens to keep their phone on while the car is in use, for viewing aftewards, so the differential safety improvement of a built-in system - if it exists - seems rather low.
But I don't care to defend all conjectural possibilities, only to point out that electronic speed limits for teen drivers is not unreasonable, and already exists for some places, so if it were dangerous we should see that already.
https://www.ford.com/support/how-tos/keys-and-locks/mykey/my...
Standard Tesla feature.