Mandatory speed limiters on EU cars from 2024
autotrader.co.uk
autotrader.co.uk
So, I am pretty sure this system will be effective in the long run. Right now, it just seems like a trial, which may require fine-tuning, but fast forward a few years, and everyone will be completely accustomed to it.
I'm quite doubtful about the latter statement:
- I know quite some people (in Germany) who still complain about the mandatory seat belt laws that were introduced in 1976 in Germany for front seats (and since 1984 for back seats if they had seat belts).
- Another example: in 2009 light bulbs were banned in the EU. I know quite a lot of people who still deeply hate the EU for this.
As I feel the current political climate, the hate against the EU in the wider public is insane. Every new such legislation is another kindled fuse for the powder keg of the fury in the public against the EU.
For the sake of anyone confused by this, incandescent lightbulbs, and even then a phase-out — Halogen was 2018 according to Wikipedia, but this news doesn't seem to have reached my local hardware store in Berlin: https://www.obi.de/search/halogen/
Plenty of light bulbs for sale, they're just different than the ones I had as a kid.
Might just be different circles/different attitudes in Ireland vs wherever you are, but I have never met an actual human in real life who is annoyed about the death of incandescent light bulbs. I've seen it from people on the internet, but to be honest mostly from Americans.
I could see why people might feel that way about seatbelts (e.g. people feeling "don't tell me I'm a bad driver!"), but I don't see how that feeling could attach to environmental issues like the aggregate emissions from (reducing from 100W to 10W * 2.5h/day * about 1 bulb/person * 400 million people =) 3.75 GW over the continent?
Never really heard of this anywhere in Europe _outside_ the UK, tho.
The _fury_ is an emotional overreaction, but to be fair this is exactly the kind of thing you can add to the ever growing pile of ammo for EU haters.
It has all the typical attributes:
- Well meaning
- Infective
- Good on paper
- Designed by committee
- Solves nothing
I think on balance the EU does more good than harm, but only just.
* light bulbs
* unified chargers
* GDPR
* making Apple screw its customers less
As I said, I value what GDPR is trying to achieve.
[0] https://www.bmi.gv.at/202/Verkehrsangelegenheiten/unfallstat... [1] https://www.oeamtc.at/presse/oeamtc-erhebung-jeder-13-pkw-in...
Why not let these people decimate themselves?
Or: a law to reduce the amount of accidental deaths seems like something good for the population in general.
And I have contacts with 70+ persons, not just teenagers.
I do not tell why now, because I'm curious how many guess correctly, if someone ask I'll tell why, and yes there is pre-modern-web research on that topic, buried of course, similar to various researches about seed oils, colza hepatic toxicity in particular, others about plastic films to wrap food and so on.
3 point seat belts means much more visceral traumas, witch tend to be more serious and not immediate to spot than orthopedic traumas, also much more chest traumas where broken ribs perforate a lung or they make the heart explode. No seat belts (with tempered and stratified glass) means much more broken legs and arms, NOT much skull damage and NOT much visceral trauma.
Back then (my mother was a young emergency room surgeon) many doctors state that the idea of seat belt is good for 4 point anchoring who can dislocate or fracture your shoulders but no more, and in case of fire/drowning you can exit them without needing to cut them, but automakers oppose that because it means making much more expensive seats while three point seat belts are pretty cheap.
After there was a gazillion of additions to makes the three point seat belts less dangerous, some have tried a small "embedded airbag", some have tried "dynamic deceleration instead of a sudden block, but most of them dramatically fails. Embedded air-bags are simply too slow to open, too easy to misplace, too little absorbent, dynamic decelerators do sglitly better but they are still not dynamic enough and so on.
Another automotive scandal is about day lights on cars, they are pushed "because various studies have proven them to be useful", no one tell than those studies are only a couple and done in the Sweden Lapland in conditions where "day lights" are essentially "position light in late evening" for most other climate. But again they are useful to sell a bit more without any benefit.
There are many others, nothing so "devastating" but enough to understand that academia need to be public and TOTALLY, RELIGIOUSLY SEPARATED form the private sector to avoid the spread of "false commercial science" for some large enough lobbyist interests. Oh BTW you can try to dig the history witch tend to be less biased as the time passes, you'll find for instance some example from Eduard Bernays campaigns https://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/12/consumer like one for the British American Tobacco company where he literally create a scientific journal publishing some real scientific articles from small universities, young PhDs and so on gaining a certain traction thanks to a free distribution models among all doctors. Slowly he insert false, but realistic scientific papers stating how smoking is good for human health and many doctors believe them and recommend smoking as a healthy habit. In few years almost all doctors if interviewed they'll state "smoking is good for health".
So well... I opposite such kind of deployments without a single, easy to locate physical button you can hit to "clear all ADAS pushing here" like an emergency button. Some examples:
- due to a health emergency you purposely want to ignore speed limits, and of course you do not want to waste time digging in car tablet preferences;
- due to a sudden emergency you need to ignore speed limits, like a landslide you see started dropping from above;
- you are actually passing another car and still at safe distance but quickly approaching another car appear in the opposite direction;
These are just few rares and far less rare examples why it's a good reason to pass limits and you have no time to deactivate the adas digging in some touch menus.
On the one hand, there's the limiter set by the driver (that you can override by pushing the pedal down hard), which is usually activated by the same lever or buttons as cruise control but works differently - you accelerate to 50mph in a 50 zone, activate the limiter, and the car will not accelerate above that limit. You can just push the gas pedal down and hold your speed as long as the road is free.
The other system is the sign detection (sometimes GPS assisted) which displays a limit sign on your dashboard and beeps at you if you go over it. My experiences as a passenger in the UK in a 2016 registration car:
- It does not recognise that "chopsticks" (start of motorway) raises the limit to 70 mph unless stated otherwise.
- It does not recognise a National Speed Limit sign built into an "end of roadworks" sign (which is the normal UK way to end a roadworks-based speed restriction on a motorway).
- When one lane is out for works, there's usually big 60 (sometimes 50) signs for the cars and a very small 15 sign for the works vehicles. Sometimes, the camera picks up the 15 sign and beeps at you about that.
I don't know if the technology has got better since. Maybe we can use AI or something.I’ve been driving for a long time but I’ve never heard this term until today
https://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Chopstic...
As long as possible might be shorter than you would like.
I fear we will see many more overtakes as this limiter makes its way onto the roads.
Edit: another comment mentioned merging- this too can be huge. If your car isn't keeping up with the flow of traffic, or unable to move faster, that could also directly cause accidents if there's a space in front but no space behind.
When I press hard on the accelerator to cancel a speed limit, does the car accelerate hard too? Or is this signal trapped for the cancel operation?
I like how confidently you say that as if "the law" was something universal
If they ever attempt this in America looks like I’ll be driving older vehicles for the rest of my life.
Edit: looks like it’s a warning not a limiter - so that’s still just as silly, it’s not going to really stop anyone from speeding, it’s just going to become another annoying non-feature of new cars that everyone hates like auto start-stop.
i guess i won't notice these beeps when you speed too much.
In any case: I hate this. Having an intuitive understanding of the handling characteristics of your vehicle is critical to driving safely, and if you go to overtake someone or try to merge, only to discover that the car isn’t accelerating because it’s decided the speed limit is lower than it is, accidents will happen.
I have an older Civic which will read road signs but doesn’t do anything but display them on the dash—and thank god, because it’s constantly getting it wrong.
Modern cars have so many beeps and bongs and touch controls that I can’t help wonder if the extra distraction is a net negative. It’s also a bit of a trope that the various lane keep assist features on modern cars will repeatedly try to drive you into a hedge or oncoming traffic the second you take them on a twisty British country road.
It’s quite common for motoring enthusiasts to tune ECUs for performance; I suspect hacking the thing to make them remember that you’ve turned them off will be equally popular.
Can disable with a hard acceleration or disable each time you start driving with a button press.
Will this system limit exactly at the speed limit? Or will it have some buffer threshold?
This seems like pretty bad tech that I don’t want. And the way it’s written seems very gaslighty… “ the speed limiter technology is simply there to prevent ‘momentary lapses of concentration’ that could result in speeding”
I don’t think my speeding is the result of momentary lapses of concentration, but calculated decisions about immediate road conditions or long term travel goals (eg, if I go 9 over the limit on a 10 hour trip, it reduces the trip by an hour).
In the part of Dublin I live in, there's a 30km/h speed limit (dense urban centre - travel times didn't really change when it came in as the traffic is horrendous anyway). It's somewhat common for people (generally visitors) to ignore this completely, barreling along far too fast and putting people in danger. I'd be quite keen on anything that would stop that.
One I can think of is long steep down hills with a large truck in back of you. Cases could exist were you could not get out of the way and you cannot speed up. I do not remember the details.
In many places in the US, this scenario does exist.
Any actual interference with driving will not prevent, but cause, accidents.
An example of this would be resistance on the pedal causing added latency on acceleration attempt.
Any evidence for that? Don't you think inattention from drivers or mechanical failures are more likely causes?
Plainly wrong.
>Inattention from drivers might be why the speed is too high, but ultimately it's the vehicle moving at a speed at which there is insufficient time to mitigate any problems that results in crashes.
That speed can easily be far below the speed limit. The speed is near irrelevant compared to the delay the driver causes by not paying proper attention.
A drunk driver driving significantly below the speed limit is far more dangerous than an attentive driver, driving above the speed limit. This is pretty obvious I think.
For example, I'll sometimes go over the speed limit when overtaking someone, because they don't actually know that you should NEVER speed up (only maintain or lose speed) while you're being overtaken. Oh no, that's not common sense, that's LAW almost everywhere.
But the worst of all cases: 3 lane highway. Me (car A) and another guy (Car B) in an acceleration lane (so 4th) trying to merge in. A car (C) in lane 3 is trying to weave between us two, as the lane is also an exit. All fine. I'll merge in, the Car C will too, and Car B will do so a bit behind.
Car (D) speeding up on lane 2 quickly turns and clearly shows themselves meaning to go to the exit lane, but noooooo, not behind anyone, he MUST go ahead of Car C. There are three outcomes in this mongoloid's cerebral physics puzzle. He crashes me if I don't get out of the way, he crashes C if they don't give way, or he panics, does something weird and either of them crash into B.
I slammed the pedal faster than I could even process what was up. If some stupid retarded automated system got in the way of that moment, I'd be in the workshop and considering my position on political activism a bit more than before.
There's no "besting". Those were examples in which the ability to accelerate prevented actual accidents.
For the first one it's "blatantly obvious" that you should just stop overtaking if someone is being hostile against you. Even if you have a rally cross situation behind you, the physics works out to be safer if you abort.
Second one is rather confusing, but it would appear that this driver of D having realized intentions of C decided to brute force the situation with speed, making driver of A to solve everything again with even more speed.
This mentality of speeding just ends up amplifying until something gives.
It's absolutely terrible.
On the highway it picks up the 50km/h panel intended for the bus lanes.
Close to where I live it hallucinates a 5km/h limit.
In random places it will miss limitations.
Right now it simply decreases engine power. On a highway that's already dangerous enough. Can't wait till they use the same visual/audio warnings as they do for the pre-collision assistant...
By the way, that's bullshit too. Triggering for no good reason and scary enough to take my eyes off the road. Love it.
At least they have given an almost measurable outcome. If only they would choose some measurable metric that had a clear cause and effect and link the legislation to scientific outcomes.
Unlike the other bullshit statement "The European Commission has said the speed limiters could prevent 140,000 serious road traffic injuries"...
Dangerous drivers speed. Reducing top speeds should prevent some serious crashes, but I am curious whether it would be as effective as hoped. And sure as shit it is nobodies job to check reality against hopes.
If anything it shows how little control NI, and indeed the Republic, has over its own laws.
Similar to how on much of the German Autobahn you can drive as fast as you want, but if you are significantly above 130km/h and an accident happens, the fast party is the one deemed guilty (unless clearly proven otherwise).
I would really like it if my car would warn me that I'm exceeding the speed limit of a stretch of road, and update dynamically. Google displays the speed limit, but doesn't warn me, and is wrong ~40% of the time.
In general there's lots of politicians and "administrators" who salivate at tech like this that constrain people and make them manageable. I find these attempts very undignified and totalitarian.
EU in a nutshell.
I had an old bmw 320d; it did about 9s; and I think that was too much.
The only thing I can really do is creep forward until I get a glimpse into the traffic, and if it's clear, accelerate the hell out of it.
So, at least for the first, let's say 30 to 50km/h, I'm very glad of the high torque and acceleration of my hybrid card.
I'd be fine with a hard speed limit though. I'd be fine with limiting the Autobahn to 130km/h.
I see no reason why a 2 tonne car should accelerate to 100km in less than 5 seconds, but here we are.
Ridiculous. People use cars for things besides going from A to B. In Germany significant parts of the streets are without speed limit and you can easily go 200km/h+.
Of the Autobahn? Yes. All of it? No
The problem though remains: Too much horse power and it's particularly sad with young men not being in full control of those cars causing accidents of all sort. Here's a recent interview with a public prosecutor in Germany: https://archive.is/20240703123415/https://www.sueddeutsche.d...
Everyone except the managers hates micromanaging for good reason, it treats me like an idiot who cannot be trusted to make his own calls. And I know better than some remote manager the best choice to make in a given situation - especially while operating high speed machinery. There have been more than a few times on the road that flooring it was safer than slowing down.
Absolute trash idea - even worse than Auto Idle Stop, I will ensure it is removed from any future car I purchase.
They understood this in the 90s, why not today? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dz4HEEiJuGo