California Bill Wants to Mandate Electronic 'Speed Limiters' in Cars | Hacker News Reader

California Bill Wants to Mandate Electronic 'Speed Limiters' in Cars

caranddriver.com

40 pointsm46392 comments

Most discussions around this argue about the implementation details the technology, perhaps as a proxy for those to signal disapproval of the proposed legislation. I’m guessing it’s because of either not wanting to directly express opposition to this idea at the risk of looking like a Luddite, small-government conservative, or whatever unpopular-in-California group that might happen to also agree, or they may might not have a compelling or logically sound reason to oppose it.

The implementation details are irrelevant. The criticisms of the technology will be met with continued improvements until those who supposedly oppose it are satisfied when it becomes rock solid, i.e. don’t strawman your own argument. You are also entitled to hold your own opinion on this, absent of any evidence or really anything to back it up.

The simple question I ask is:

> If we assume that this technology works every time, all the time, would you still welcome this law?

For me, absolutely not. This actively takes control away from the driver and for that reason, this is an unacceptable solution. This is just an opinion I hold.

It restricts the liberties of a driver, sure (though speeding is not permitted, so it doesn't actually restrict any rights) but enforces other drivers' and pedestrians' right to safety.

That said, I agree with current technology levels, I'd be more worried about how that goes wrong more than anything.

Safety from law breakers (speeders) is not a right in the US. 'Safety' isn't even a right. I'm not sure why you'd elevate someone's safety from a specific thing to a right yet make a person's autonomy a liberty. Also you're restricting the liberties of the driver (a specific, identifiable person in the case of non-autonomous vehicles) in favor of people who may not even exist (other drivers or pedestrians may not even be around) which seems draconian. When you pass these laws and restrictions, what are you giving up? Isn't someone's sense of self control and autonomy worth something to society?

"Isn't someone's sense of self control and autonomy..."

Indeed, it's worth a lot! Which is why I want my children to be able to walk and bike safely anywhere in the town. Or anyone else who can't, doesn't, or simply prefers not to drive, for that matter.

Thats great that we both agree that we want safe streets and value autonomy! Glad I could change your mind. Now let's work on incentivizing people who don't drive safely to do so without impacting the liberties of those who do.

It’s easier to convince voters and politicians to enact technical control mandates than to persuade the lizard brain of your average human. Is that lazy? Sure, but there is no extra credit in life for taking the hard path.

Much easier to go after politicians and say “People will keep dying if you don’t enact this policy, and we will vote you out if you don’t.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/10/magazine/dangerous-drivin... | https://archive.is/2024.01.16-150053/https://www.nytimes.com... (“Why Are American Drivers So Deadly? After decades of declining fatality rates, dangerous driving has surged again.”

> Above all, though, the problem seems to be us — the American public, the American driver. “It’s not an exaggeration to say behavior on the road today is the worst I’ve ever seen,” Capt. Michael Brown, a state police district commander in Michigan, told me. “It’s not just the volume. It’s the variety. There’s impaired driving, which constituted 40 percent of our fatalities last year. There are people going twice the legal limit on surface streets. There’s road rage,” Brown went on. “There’s impatience — right before we started talking, I got an email from a woman who was driving along in traffic and saw some guy fly by her off the roadway, on the shoulder, at 80, 90 miles an hour.” Brown stressed it was rare to receive such a message: “It’s got so bad, so extremely typical,” he said, “that people aren’t going to alert us unless it’s super egregious.”

For what it's worth I just want to let my kids run around and not get killed. Something like bloommerwede.nl would be great in the US. Cul-de-sac is getting there

> 'Safety' isn't even a right.

Nor is driving on public roads that have thousands of existing regulations on who, what, and how they can be driven on.

It's taking away their ability to commit a crime which endangers other people.

If that's the motive here, then why not start with limiting guns?

That sounds like a sensible thing to do!

I am terrified by the sentiment that we should take away free will because it might be dangerous.

The difference is that your right to swing your fists ends where my face begins. And operating a 2 ton death machine (the words of noted car enthusiast Elon Musk, not my own) in excess of the speed limit near people walking, biking, and just going about their lives is deeply selfish.

> The difference is that your right to swing your fists ends where my face begins

So... we should mandate everyone wear arm braces that contain computer chips that will prevent people from punching others?

You could also use that argument for enforcing curfews on the whole population. There’d be no more night time stabbings.

When picking laws, you can’t look at just the one problem, you have to look at the slippery slope it creates.

I don't like this idea any more than anyone else, but I think that this is inevitable. The American public in general (IDK about CA specifically) not only has no problem with a nanny state, they welcome it. The idea that freedom is valuable even though people will do bad things with it is very much a minority view nowadays, in my experience.

I’m curious where you got that impression from? The people in California might have a different view but the majority of us hate the nanny state that our government has turned into.

Just my interactions with people, seeing online discussions, etc. Like I said, I'm not speaking for California people in particular. I haven't lived there. But in American society in general, nanny state laws seem to be very popular.

The benefit of this is _less_ nannying in other areas. If the cars on your street do 20 mph instead of 35, you might be more likely to let your kids play outside.

What about my neighbors who might be child abductors or rapists? Or the animals, like a beer or eagle who might fly away with my kid? There's always something to be afraid of for people who are afraid.

IMO we would be better suited by building cities and spaces that are more "car free".

Ya know, walkable communities and all that.

Reliably and consistently determining the speed limit is still a challenge for cars. This is also going to suck in places where the flow of traffic is 10+ MPH over the posted speed limit, of which there are many in California. And it would obviously be problematic for safely passing on rural highways.

GPS also often gets confused and suddenly thinks the car is on a frontage road instead of the freeway. Under this proposal, would the car suddenly brake to 25 mph when that happens?

Frontage roads are more of a southern USA thing than a west coast thing.

You could just speed limit the car to the highest speed limit in the state/county/within 100 meters and still do some good.

California has them all over the place.

Indeed! They’re everywhere really, especially along 99

I’ve lived in the Bay Area and LA and have never seen one next to a freeway at least. Maybe a bit next to 101 between the cities, but they never go through or provide much access to the freeway (they didn’t provide parallel access to the freeway, on and off ramps were normal).

Definitely not a huge road actually named Frontage Road that I found common in Mississippi and when I did a stint in Austin.

Visit Lodi, Stockton, Fresno, Turlock, Ripon, Bakersfield, Modesto, Manteca, etc. etc. and you will find them very common.

Here's an example of a road named Frontage Rd by I-5 in Lodi. https://maps.app.goo.gl/HtXDV95yTpDzPTyc9

Ugh, California is big. I lived in Austin one summer and they had 5 lane frontage roads surrounding ten lane freeways, and of course Mississippi had frontage road around I20 pretty much everywhere. Here in Seattle, we barely have any roads that run next to freeways at all, their simply isn’t enough room.

Between San Diego and Riverside on I-15 they put a toll freeway inside the main freeway. Almost a frontage freeway!

> GPS also often gets confused and suddenly thinks the car is on a frontage road instead of the freeway.

When driving on Highway 17 (between Los Gatos and Santa Cruz, southern silicon valley area), very often my GPS will suddenly jump to being in one of the tiny mountain roads that parallel 17 and trying to start rerouting me back to 17 even though I'm on 17.

For anyone familiar with 17, you can imagine the consequences if the car braked hard in the middle of a corner from highway speed to tiny backroad speed!

When I'm driving in Europe it works pretty well, but Europe (well, the EU at least) tends to have far more deterministic rules about what the speed limit is in a given place. It's been handy at times since you might not realize the speed limit changes upon entering a town, etc.

Speed limiters (though, ones that can be overriden temporarily) are already law. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/27/tech/europe-speed-limits-...

It’s interesting and kind of sad that the region which was once the frontier of Western society (socially, technologically, etc.) is now often the leader in restricting things. There is a theory that American society needs a frontier and without one, problems arise.

More and more, I’m buying this idea but unfortunately I think we’ll have to wait a few centuries until serious space colonization becomes a viable thing in the way “escaping to the West” was a thing two hundred years ago.

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

It’s unfortunate that the everything really becomes enshitified. It’s a slow march as generational knowledge is lost and we collectively forget what we were trying to escape only to be trapped in a cage made of that very thing - only this time, we made it.

There is such a bias for bad news to surface that people think society is consistently getting worse and it seems like there is this obsession with using law to “fix” every societal ill when most of these “fixes” just pushes the problem out of view.

We have a track record of taking (what we may perceive as) societal issues and turning them into a legal issue, the result of which has contributed to, for example, the United States being a nation with one of the highest (if not, the highest) percentage of its citizens currently incarcerated - a fact we should be absolutely ashamed of, not to mention the treatment of those reentering society.

We live in a pseudo police-state who’s laws are written by people who are affected the least by them or consider (or care) about externalities caused by a direct or indirect consequence of the law. We have turned drug use/addiction (by proxy with “possession”) from a medical problem to a legal problem. Some states have done the same with abortion. The content of libraries are being challenged because, “think of the children!” My county criminalizes working on your own vehicles on your own property, and California’s emissions requirements have created an undue burden on those with little means via a smog exemption date that is fixed and the requirement of specific emissions equipment that is frequently stolen, preventing vehicles from keeping registration current without a very costly, multi-thousand dollar repair. This leads to cars being prematurely scrapped because people just simply cannot afford it.

These aren't problems with "everything becoming enshittified". The problems you cite are mostly unique to the US among developed nations. Other countries don't have the problems with abortion bans, catalytic converter thefts, etc. that you're seeing in the US, and certainly not the ridiculous incarceration rate.

I think the problem is that once a set of rules is in place then people will try to entrench them within those rules for their own benefit (social, monetary etc). Once that happens there isn't a good way to break those entrenchments, so you need to find another frontier or niche to flourish (or create a revolution). This applies to government, businesses, and even regular social interactions.

At the heart of it is that people need to feel like they can accomplish something before they even try. There needs to be enough low-hanging fruit for people to grab onto to start the journey. This builds them up more and more. Eventually they do to things that, at first, seemed impossible.

Speed throttling means the car has to know the posted speed limit. So will it be illegal to have a car in California without a GPS tracking your location in real-time?

Or will it simply be illegal to have a car without cameras tracking everywhere you go, to read speed limit signs?

That could be actually disguise for installing those tracking devices and gather even more data with gaining more control

Not necessarily. The vehicle can communicate with the speed limiter pole to obtain the speed limit and adjust its speed accordingly. There are no cameras, no GPS, and the speed limit can be set dynamically.

What information will it pass to those poles, if any?

Why does it need to transmit anything at all?

> communicate with the speed limiter pole

As a person who's reverse engineered O(1000) "secure" devices and O(100) "secure protocols", let me just laugh aloud at the thought that this will be done right!!!

Basically: new fun use for SDR just dropped! Randomly broadcast speed limits of 1mph near the higway.

There is no security at all on many infrared traffic signal overrides. You can easily hack them, you just have to decide if it’s worth the risking being charged with a crime that carries a minimum 6 month prison sentence.

How would that work? Cell phones record your location as a side effect, because they can be seen by multiple cell towers.

But in this scheme, your car would record your location as the primary effect. You can still see multiple limiter poles. How do you know which one applies to you? You need to determine your location for that. (Unlike with cell phones, the pole with the strongest signal is not necessarily the one that applies to your position.)

If the limiter poles can receive as well as broadcast, they will also record your location, just like cell towers do. But even if they can't, it's necessary for the car to do so itself.

Very problematic. How does the vehicle know which pole to talk to? How does it know it’s not incorrectly communicating with a pole on a parallel or perpendicular road, for example? Or indeed a road that is below another road, as sometimes occurs in urban environments. So so so many issues. How does the vehicle reliably know which road it’s on? How is the system kept invulnerable to bad actors? Etc etc

I don’t agree with the proposed solution being entertained here, but all of these problems are solved. Because automated tolling systems work this way.

Automated rolling systems work on specific roads designed for it.

The suggested mandate is for all roads, which introduces crosstalk errors in the system decoding the environment.

There are tolling systems that assign different tolls to different lanes and different vehicles on the same road. It would be prohibitively expensive to put on all roads, but the technology exists and it works.

Either via RF or line-of-sight IR.

The RF method works the same way ILS for aircraft works: multiple lobes of differing frequencies to a compatible receiver that will only accept the data if both frequencies are present and the interference pattern matches the conditions that it is looking out for.

IR is considerably simpler and would require a receiver to pick up on a well-aimed beam.

For bad actor mitigation, they could put a signature at the end of the speed data that signs the packet with the priority, route, datestamp, and TTL. The priority field could help enforce slower limit around construction zones.

Now I can only imagine fun times when those get stolen from road works... And then relocated to some other places. Maybe just simple plastic bag used to cover the number...

The draft bill [1] appears to require GPS, yes:

> Article 19. Speed Limiter Technology

> 28170. As used in this article, “intelligent speed limiter system” means an integrated vehicle system that uses, at minimum, the GPS location of the vehicle compared with a database of posted speed limits, to determine the speed limit, and electronically limits the speed of the vehicle to prevent the driver from exceeding the speed limit by more than 10 miles per hour.

[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

While it sounds nice, gps jitter will cause a lot of issues unless it just defaults to the highest speed in a couple block radius

Good thing GPS spoofing is so hard to do (heavy sarcasm)

Also, good thing GPS spoofing doesn’t happen regularly in California (also sarcasm)

Also, good thing that GPS works flawlessly in canyons, underpasses, tunnels, etc… (if it’s not yet obvious, is sarcasm too)

This feels like an “idea man” level concept.

This would not work well for my car right now - the GPS sometimes decides it's a few blocks to the right on the surface streets instead of on the highway. :')

I think the legislators who thought this was a great idea should be required to trial the technology. If their car suddenly brakes on the freeway, causing a massive crash, they should be personally liable and also charged with reckless driving or worse.

The highway could also broadcast the speed limit, via beacons. That would be more reliable than GPS, but GPS doesn't track your location. A GPS receiver is just that--it receives, never broadcasts. It needn't record anything in order to enforce the speed limit.

Who’s going to pay for that?

Who pays for highways now? What kind of question is that?

This also allows highway speed limits to vary based on conditions, which is better than the status quo.

Some cars already have completely offline systems that read traffic signs. They’re pretty simple to design computers to read because they’re in a standardized format. They do have less than perfect accuracy, however.

I do think it would suck but it would be sensible to have electronic limits that cap at something very high such as 90mph.

It's better than nothing and no one should ever go at that speed anyway.

On a public road, not in most countries. But racetracks are a thing, and regular people do go there, in regular cars.

Most cars do have electronic speed limiters today, which are often set to values that reflect the mechanical limitations of the vehicle (e.g. the designed speed rating on the factory equipped tires, etc)

Sometimes I go over 100 on I-70 in rural Colorado/Utah after Grand Junction when there's a huge straight road and you can see for 20 miles and there's no one around

As a German, I have to fiercely object here (:

More seriously: Almost all cars in Germany are limited to 250km/h (155 mph). Higher limits for more powerful cars are also found in the 280-290 km/h (173-180 mph) range.

So, de facto, even in Germany speed limiters have been a thing for decades. The discussion should thus be more about the limit, rather than the device itself.

Obviously this is different than imposing a „+10 mph“ limit, since the car would have to know the speed limit of the current road.

> As a German, I have to fiercely object here (:

As a German, I have to fiercely object to people fiercely objecting here. I would enjoy German highways way more, if there was a sensible speed limit just like there is in the rest of the world. Also, I think the police should start going after people who don't keep safe distances (as a function of the speed they're going) and pressing criminal charges for intimidation.

Alot of cars do have a governor limiting the top speed, 115 and 155 are common. This is mostly because you need to look at every part of the car to know that is could go that fast. Car manufacturers limit it so the tires won't blow out for example.

This seems fair considering the panic over scooters going 12 miles an hour and the very strict geofencing applied to them. I especially welcome it in cities where it could save many pedestrians.

Any reduction in accidents will be offset by increases in road rage.

Surprise phantom braking on the highway, going in a tunnel under a road with 30 mph. This is an EU thing, all cars sold after 2024 must have this

What EU directive is that?

It's not one. There's a directive for connected vehicles produced after 2022 to be equipped with ISA, but it's a limiter, and doesn't do what GP is saying. You can always deactivate it, and you can also go past the limit if you push the accelerator, if going past the limit helps go past a truck or help for a dangerous situation.

You can just "temporarily" disable the system every time you start the car like auto start-stop and still be in full compliance as it's currently written. Even for people who want this mandated this bill is atrociously written.

As far as I know Volvo is leader in this technology (yet other manufacturers also provide both smart limit recognition) and it sucks so much it’s laughable (speaking from experience of driving in Europe).

I usually have 3 sources of speed limit in my car right now. Built-in from downloaded maps + GPS, Apple Maps from GPS and online data, and also 3rd party alerter for traffic conditions, speed traps etc - mixture of radio, gps and non-map data sources. It’s not uncommon for two to be different. It’s not uncommon for three to be different; I’ve been pulled over for driving over speed limit even though all 3 sources were in consensus and showed much higher one.

One of the worst things ever happened when I drove Volvo XC60 (2019 model) few years back. I was driving on the side road during maintenance with slightly lowered speed limit and as I was doing so car picked up one of the construction-reserved lane signs with heavy speed limit (like 10% of the one I was driving on). Immediately displayed warning and began to break hard (I wasn’t aware there was default setting to honor perceived speed limit when driving grossly over it) almost causing a collision.

Maybe in California it’d be easier, never been there but I believe roads aren’t so busy as in Europe. Yet over the years I grew very skeptic about this technology and after experiencing it first hand from “leader” I enjoy my current - dumber - car more.

I really need SF to stop sending idiots to the state senate.

Get involved with your local Republican party and work to kick out the loons. This kind of legislation flourishes when the party that proposes it has no fear of competition.

All there is is loons.

I’ll take those “loons” over any democracy destroying republican since we don’t have a third choice though.

I think you misinterpreted the comment you replied to. The "loons" being referred to were the democracy-destroying Republicans. He's suggesting trying to get rid of them, so that there is a non-lunatic alternative to the Democrats.

Sure. But any single party state is inherently non-democratic regardless of anything else.

It’s not like there isn’t a choice so it’s odd to call it single party. The majority of Californians don’t see anything republicans offer worth voting for. That’s pretty democratic.

Your point may be valid for heavily gerrymandered states though, which are without exception in today’s America Republican lead.

Any system dominated by a single party with no real checks and balances will inevitably becomes thoroughly corrupt. Having the theoretical option to vote for someone else hardly changes that if there is no credible competition.

> Your point may be valid for heavily gerrymandered states though

Any FPTP system. Gerrymandering is just the icing on the cake.

It does become a problem in a two party system when one party becomes too extreme for people with moderate viewpoints to consider, since the result is a de facto one-party system (at best, or the extreme party in power at worst). And indeed, this means less of a check on the more extreme impulses of that remaining party.

Whether a grassroots initiative to moderate the Republican party would be successful, I'm less convinced.

> one party becomes too extreme for people with moderate viewpoints to consider

CA Democrats have been that way since CA became a one-party state. It is not new, sadly.

I'm rather sorry because this is performative bullshit by Wiener which if anything might cause his party to lose a few races outside of California.

IIRC, bikes are limited to 187 mph via inter manufacturer agreement. See? Private sector self-regulation works great for this. No need to legislate.

>187 mph

I hope this is sarcasm?

Why 187mph? That's about 300.9 kph. If it's 300 kph, the mph equivalent is about 186.4, which rounds down to 186.

It's a real thing, but yes, 300 kph.

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

[dupe]

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39124972

The kind of cunt that kills people with their bad driving is exactly the kind of cunt that will disable this with a $30 device he buys on the internet. Meanwhile the rest of us won’t be able to do 90 on the 5 in the middle of fucking nowhere.

I'm sure many agree with your underlying point, but please don't fulminate like this on HN. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Sorry.

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