Most comments in this thread comments on the fact that Europeans are loosing their freedom do speed, and that they will not be able to drive fast.
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.
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.
Ok I'll bite. The single most thing I hate about driving car in Germany is the lack of an upper speed limit on big stretches of the Autobahn. If you cross over from any neighbouring country any driver will notice that what before was a friendly chugging along now has become a stressful battle between people who just want to go somewhere with a good compromise of speed and fuel use and speedsters who will breath up you neck even if you are going 160. No thanks.
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.
Maybe I'm too old school, but I don't agree with you. Here in Belgium there used to be a law that when you have 2 lanes in the same direction with a middle section separating the other direction(s), you could go 120. Then it became 90, and now in most places it's 70. There are no pedestrians there, so there is no real reason why not to drive at least 90. Everybody there drives 90. Speed limits are currently just too low, that's why nobody is obeying them. And adapting roads to go slower is just plain ridiculous.
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.
Their argument is basically what "strong towns" is about. There is a video series on YouTube which goes over the books content if you're interested. There is definitely truth in it and your examples are spot on with proving their point, you're just missing context as it's not really possible to summarize it in one comment.
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
The environmental argument for speed limits is ridiculous because many places have a carbon tax/other taxes meant to capture the unpriced environmental cost that accrues to the commons. With the carbon tax the person doing the speeding is paying for any excess harm they to the environment they may be doing and is willing to pay that cost in order to go faster so they should be able to go faster. If you don't think the cost of carbon is properly priced argue to raise your carbon tax, don't argue to add additional special taxes for various things you don't like.
The crazy thing is that the Autobahns are not exactly safe ... Sure, millions of people drive on them every day and most of them will never be in an accident. Still there are about 15000 accidents per year on the Autobahns [1].
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.)
Speed bumps alone don't help, that is right. You also need to have raised pedestrian crossings, you need to reduce lane width (maybe even so narrow that you have to yield when a car is coming from the other direction), the street needs to not be straight, etc. The space you get from that can be used for trees, bicycle paths, broader sidewalks and such niceties.
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.
Straw man, germany has physical speed limits on most of the Autobahn. Meaning the rightmost lane is usually filled with trucks, leaving one or two lanes, were the aging populations slowest drivers create a upper speed limits (usually 120). And even those struggle with those slow Netherlands caravans. Your habbits are not a borthright to be a traffic obsticle in another country.
I said driving on the German Autobahn (I live in Germany btw.) is more stressful than driving on a same looking street that has a speed limit of say 130 like in Austria. Traffic flow is better when all people go at similar speed. Safety is better, pollution is better, noise is better and it makes not that much difference.
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.
many people do go 160+ in Austria, then hit the brakes when the speedcam approaches, then speed up again.
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)
yeah, as someone living close to the Austrian border and being over there very often... every single trip every nth car overtakes me when I'm going 130 as allowed. You just need to be local and know where you'll have to pay a fine. Depends on which of theirs though, the one from Salzburg to Italy isn't so bad, but the others are.
I wasn't complaining, I'm completely happy to go 130 - just stating the fact that there are more locals speeding than Germans. And the "fun" fact is that on certain days there are actually more cars with German plates on their Autobahn than Austrian ones.. or certainly a 2:1 ratio at most.
Well, this is like with all slippery slope argument. First they set the speed limit to 70, then to 50, then to 20, then you can't drive at all. So better not let them set any limit?
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.
Especially with the earth's population being what it is, and if you want to believe in climate change too, maybe those fatalities are still too low...
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.
Well, cool. Speeding is the main source of accidents. Even escooters know where they are and reduce the maximum speed in some zones. Nobody ever was killed with an escooter. Why can't we restrict cars to the speed they are supposed to drive? It would make driving so much easier!
Further, a website that most Australians would consider biased towards motoring enthusiasts and not afraid of dabbling in clickbait-y crap to drive (hehe) traffic to their website (examples below).
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.
Back in the day, all Singaporean taxis used to be fitted (by law) with warning systems that went "ding, ding, ding" continuously if the car ever exceeded Singapore's top speed limit of 90 km/h. But even nanny state Singapore gave up on this, because it was just too annoying and pointless.
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:
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.
So all cars will be susceptible to "phantom braking" due to a bug or worse? I really dislike this, and living in the third world I can already imagine fake road signs being used to decelerate and rob cars.
I'm not sure why this is the consistent take. We have e-scooters and bikes with limiters on speed, why would this be materially different than cars?
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?
It is not an order. You tell it what to do and it responds with: "No". To the benefit of the rest of us who have to live with what you "tell" to machines.
It’s not even that it says “no”, in most cases it will be you tell it what to do and it does that while flashing a light on the dashboard to indicate that it may be illegal
Let's do a joke where we go on the highway, and some people in the back pull out a painted sign with (30). Camera of the car behind you detects it and breaks. I can see such shenanigans happening.
Sounds like having the theoretical ability to disobey those stops and drive super-fast through them will buy you very little. That's a kind of freedom you only get to exercise once in your life.
I imagine it would work by GPS (at least in Europe the speed limit of most roads can even be displayed in google maps).
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.
> When ISA detects the car is over the limit, it may induce visual and audible warnings, as well as haptic feedback through the steering wheel or throttle pedal, or it may begin accelerating the vehicle if no action is taken.
The article wasn’t very clear around this, but it’s not that every car must have automatic deceleration, it’s one way out of four car makers may implement this:
> 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
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;
I object to driving any car with a built-in GPS or an internet connection, on basic privacy grounds. It amazes me how many advocacy groups and organizations [edit: and bicycle fans right here on HN!] are willing to completely demolish essential rights like privacy and freedom of movement, in the name of preventing speeding accidents.
I object to people operating dangerous vehicles in areas I walk without proper safety equipment. Feel free to drive whatever you want on your own private property.
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.
First of all, I hope you don't walk or ride your bike on the interstate. Secondly, being prohibited from using any form of transport faster than a bike without providing GPS location and personal identifiers is, for all intents and purposes, a total ban on freedom of travel. It's not like I think my freedom to drive without a GPS gives me a right to run over bikers. But the fact that you're willing to sacrifice all privacy and put any controls imaginable on free navigation to prevent stupid people from being stupid is extremely myopic. How long do you think it will be before every bike has to have a GPS and a personal identifier too? Ultimately that may not matter to you, but then again you might be just as happy with a bigsceen TV and a hamster wheel as going out, if they told you it was better for ya.
The counter-argument to this is that driving a 2-ton machine capable of killing people is not a fundamental right either.
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.
AFAIK there's no need to show IDs to board a train in Europe (maybe some EU countries have other rules there, I don't know).
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.
In the US, passport or biometric ID is now required for all domestic flights and intercity trains. YOUR PAPERS, PLEASE.
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.
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.
GPS is not a tracking technology. It's read-only. It allows you to determine your coordinates by listening to satellites. GPS receivers don't send your location.
I think they mean the advent of sending that GPS data over a cellular modem back to some home server. Due to the advent of GDPR+CLOUD Act[0], no US company can legally own a subsidiary in the EU and collect any PII-linked data from EU citizens; in other words, the GDPR's goal is to localize all citizen data within the country's borders. With this, it'll be super easy for a country to obtain that locally-stored information for the purpose of police 'investigations' (possibly via europol/similar for cross-country intel).
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.
It’s near impossible to buy a new car that doesn’t have some “smart” feature. Sadly electric is synonymous with “smart” features so it’s only going to get worse.
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.
It’s funny because most recent crime movies have become implausible when you know the level of monitoring and forensic (whether electronic, DNA, CCTVs, etc). It kinds of ruin the story to me.
Contrary to other "think of the children"-scenarios this one has an actual death number tacked to it.
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.
For the last time, my comment is not about the privilege of people to drive (which you seem to want to abolish?) it's about the right to move around without being tracked. Also, it is about your rights to privacy if you should want to exercise them.
I am not sure how you extrapolate me being against people driving from me being against people speeding. You can drive very well without speeding.
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).
Your assumption that no data will be written, about where/when/why your car automatically brakes, is incredibly naive. Everything is written the moment your car has a GPS tied to a wireless service. If you think European privacy laws are preventing that from happening, you're utterly insane. Even if your country doesn't store the data, the Americans are storing it and your country may ask for it at any time.
A better idea would be to mandate black-boxes so if you do get pulled over there is no contest on whether or not you were speeding or made a full stop at the stop sign. You can use that as evidence and it can be used against you as well. This way, when I am driving on 85mph limited road under ideal conditions and little traffic I can pass other cars doing 100mph or more to get past the current pack and stay under 90 till the next pack. The right lane is for driving speed limit, left lanes are for driving past the limit while passing until you merge back on the right lane(s).
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)
"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."
> When ISA detects the car is over the limit, it may induce visual and audible warnings, as well as haptic feedback through the steering wheel or throttle pedal, or it may begin accelerating the vehicle if no action is taken.
“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.”
Streets are designed for a certain max speed to be the safest speed. People drive the designed speed, not the sign speed. Governments place mobile speeding radars for revenue rather than making the streets safe.
I'm not aware of a "freedom to speed" under either the US Constitution or the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights.
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.
Please see the 10th amendment. "Freedom to speed" is reserved for the states to decide. However, like the Federal Government has done in the past (the since repealed National Maximum Speed Law), it may attempt to persuade states by withholding some, but not too much funding (South Dakota v. Dole).
No, the 10th Amendment doesn't guarantee you the right to speed. The closest thing would really be the 9th Amendment, but even that doesn't imply a positive right to speed -- the strongest argument would be that nothing forbids a right to speed, which in turn must be justified as an actual right. Which, in fact, it is not.
(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.)
It's a sad state of affairs. Liberties are being killed one after another usually in the name of safety as-if all EU citizens are living in extreme fear and danger.
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.
I feel the opposite about America. We have many consumer and social protections that Americans don't. They seem to value freedom over the well-being of the average citizen.
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.
I'd argue that it's almost never correct to drive the speed limit. In the US at least they are almost universally slower than the natural speed of the road by 5-10 mph and everyone speeds a bit all the time.
This is a bit preposterous. First off, do you know how speeds are set? Civil engineers build a road, and then figure out the 85th percentile speed for that road based on sample data collected. [0]
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).
> 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.
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.
> 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).
Things must be crashing and burning over there in California with all the driverless cars.
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.
They won't. The rich won't let you dictate how fast they can go, so ferraris will be exempt. The upper classes will 'illegaly' turn off the limiter on their teslas 250d, but no sane sheriff will dare to enforce the law here. Middle class will be loosely complaint, the same way they observe the speed limit laws today. Only the lower classes will have no choice but to drive the 'chopper cars'.
There are still tons of cars from the 90's and early 2000's on the road (in particular the '01 Camry), it'll be at least 20-30 years and anyone with a new car being limited is just going to be harassed for driving way too slow relative to traffic.
And even once this is over, I think it's pretty often the speed limits and not the people driving over them that are in the wrong. I don't think slowing everyone down is a useful goal unless we adjust the limits up first.
I agree, but I don't think that would be a good thing.
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.
That might be right, but suddenly enforcing a limit when overtaking can easily cause an accident.
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.
Come to Houston. You better be speeding on the highway or you're in danger. When everyone is speeding, and you're doing 60mph, you're a danger to yourself and everyone around you.
Passing a slow car (driving below the limit) on two lane undivided highway. You could pass them at the speed limit, but its safer to just speed up while passing the car and then reduce your speed when you are back in your lane.
I had to do this multiple times passing RVs while on a road trip this weekend.
It's legal, at least in the US, if there is a dotted or broken yellow line between the two lanes, the opposite lane is clear, and you have enough time/space to complete the overtaking before it swaps back to solid yellow. For obvious reasons, you generally want to spend as little time as possible in a lane that has traffic coming at you head-on.
Your opinion is asinine. If using the lane at that time/place to pass was not suitable it wouldn't be signed/marked for such. Increasing the time it takes for people to execute a pass is a regression in safety from the status quo.
Dunno how exactly these systems work, but I assume it wasn't designed by idiots who never driven a car before and accounts overtaking. Warning should be only ON when sustaining the speed, not for few seconds.
Every toy drone will refuse to fly into protected airspace. Theres no reason a car made in the past 10 years should be able to go 50 mph and beyond in a city.
But a toy drone is a toy. It isn't really super impactful if you can't fly it in a protected airspace.
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?
Aviation has solved this problem a long time ago by controlling airspace and having laws that are actually enforced. Your plane may not prevent you from entering restricted airspace, but it may very well be the last thing you do as a pilot.
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.
I'd really like my car to automatically limit itself to a bit under the legal limit.
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.
I'd love to have that as an option. I'm not in a hurry to get anywhere. I usually get speeding fines because I'm not paying attention to the speed limit or my own speed.
It's a bit like cruise control. I like not having to constantly monitor my speed.
The worse thing is that car going according to a speed limit like 40-50km/h still can seriously injure or worse a pedestrian especially a child or elderly. Limiting the speed is one thing but adjusting road infrastructure in the cities to make it safer for pedestrians is a second thing-how many crosswalks I've seen that are barely visible- I don't even count. Surely everyone seen a local newspaper article at some point of pedestrian being killed but the driver was sober and wasn't speeding.
Not the OP but this is pretty much a no-brainer: over your life, do you pay more in taxes or in speeding tickets?
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.
That is a very good observation and a well-explained statement. Thank you for providing an additional perspective from a nation level macro lens as opposed to an individualistic level.
Looks like the driver can disable the system, if the manufacturer allows. I'm sure popular "driver's cars" will offer this feature.
> 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.
This is not a bad idea - but speed limits have not changed to reflect changing cars.
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.
You mentioned it, but to clarify: cars are much safer for their occupants. As a pedestrian or cyclist, I'm pink mist whether the speeding car has lane assist or not.
> Cars are now much much safer, and yet speed limits outside of cities have not changed to reflect this.
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.
No, they will set up cameras and fine anybody going more than a few km/h or so over the speed limit (theoretically they can fine you for going 1 km/h over the limit but there is some kind of tolerance, people usually assume 10% but the police and road agencies don't disclose what it is (apparently it's not always the same for every road or for the conditions at the time either). I believe it's generally less than 10%).
I've been worried about something like this ever since maps first started showing the speed limit on the road I was on. It feels like an inevitability.
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.
Newer cars like my accord use a camera that looks for speed limit signs. What's funny is it's not perfect and sometimes will read a random sign and tell me the speed limit is like 100mph on a 35mph road.
Yeah, those systems have fun issues around elections here in Finland. Often there is advertisements around roads and our system works with each candidate having their own number. These are usually in nice circles with black text in white background for best visibility...
That can't possibly work everywhere. Here in my state in Australia we have speed signs for the off-ramps where they are clearly visible from the freeway, so you might be in a 100 km/h zone but see a 60 km/h sign off the side that could easily be mistaken for a speed sign for the freeway (it's actually not that great design, sometimes they have a sign saying 'ramp speed' under it but not always)
Their ideas of laws are hilarious as they are Kafkaesque.
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.
Nope, because that's an EU law, the ones collecting speeding fines are national governments. And the saved lives, and resources from having less traffic police, will probably make up for the fines lost anyways.
I predict that the politicians will, after much grumbling by the public, have the speed limits raised to reflect the speeds people actually want to drive. And then we'll have to endure a bunch of breathless hand wringing and concern feigning about how "it will be a bloodbath" from the usual suspects.
That's already happening with insurance. Some insurers are offering "safe driving discounts" if you install their app, which tracks your speed. If you exceed a speed limit, you lose the discount for that month. It's your problem to remember to disable it if someone else is driving.
How well does this work in areas where almost every car is speeding? Especially since there would be a mix of older cars without the tech sharing the road.
Over time this should result in speed limits adjusting to how fast people actually drive, rather than it always being assumed that people drive faster by 10 mph or whatever.
When Mt Saint Helens erupted there was an account from a survivor who raced away at 100mph, passing a car traveling at 80mph and seeing the slower car disappear into the ash cloud with little chance of surviving. Even in in the most extreme events your proposed limit is adequate.
Have you ever been on I-10 in west Texas or New Mexico? Nothing but straight, flat blacktop and little traffic. 150km/h (93 mph for my fellow Americans) is kind of slow for that stretch. Granted it is 8 mph above the posted speed limit, but nobody really pays attention to that.
I have made plenty of long distance drives through some of the flattest and most desolate parts of this country and I have never seen cars going anywhere close to 100mph on average. Mostly 80's to 90's. One huge reason for that is fuel efficiency, which is dogshit even at 90mph. The other is that most cars really don't handle great past 90. And another is that you're far more likely to end up a fine bloody mist if you do happen to collide at that speed. Not likely, sure, but those speeds also come with vastly reduced reaction times.
Why not? There are roads without speed limits, both public and private, and drivers capable of driving safely above that speed. Driving really fast doesn't happen to be my hobby, but I see the appeal.
You got the question I was responding to backward, it was said that there is absolutely no rational reason why cars should be able to drive above 150km/hr.
"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".
You’d eliminate all traffic fatalities if you limited cars to 5 mph. We as a society have collectively decided that X number of traffic fatalities are acceptable. It’s the price everyone pays for efficient transportation.
Why 150km/h and not 40km/h? Are you too impatient to drive 40km/h
even though it could save lives?
This is a bad faith argument, but I'll respond: 150km/h is not arbitrary.
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.
Oh no, we will just limit it at the speed limit. What could be the problem with that?
No one has accepted anything, certainly not the increasing number of dead pedestrians from ever larger cars. You surely recognize the massive moral hazard.
Driving the speed of traffic is safer than driving the speed limit. Or what about when you’re seeking shelter during a tornado warning or bringing someone to the hospital. Or maybe you just want to get away from a road raging a-hole.
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.
I know you intended it to be a bit of a throwaway comment, but I think you hit on something very fundamental and human which explains why everyone is so outraged by things like this: taking risks is part of life, the thrill is the enjoyment. That's what true freedom feels like... and also responsibility, since if you mess up, you also face the consequences.
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.
That's not called freedom --- it's cowardice, the state of being afraid to live. Maybe making you too scared to do anything without government permission is the end game of stuff like this.
Not at all a subtle clue that the EU is rapidly speeding towards (pun very much intended) being a totalitarian socialist police state. On the other hand, one wonders how much support stuff like this will have in the US --- because at least it seems that we have the infamous Franklin quote and at least like to talk about our freedom a lot more...
It is not unique to EU. Just remember the Covid restrictions in USA in past years. Clearly fascist totalitarian policies. We are all heading to bad place and no one is fighting against it.
You're right, it's not just the EU but they seem to be leading (along with the Orwellian UK). The pandemic certainly raised the bar for tolerating totalitarianism. Also, 9/11 before that. There's definitely opposition, although whether it's sufficient is the question. One hopes the rest of the population will realise and join them before it's too late.
The same European countries have one lane roads where horse carriages and slow old oil burning cars and trucks cause long lines of other vehicles that desperately try to pass each other and the culprit of the delay without hitting incoming cars and trucks from the reverse lane next to them, in the dark with little markings. This game of chicken leads to big speeds, and lots and lots of death. Now imagine if you are speed restricted and the car you are trying to pass wants to drive the speed limit after they see they are getting passed. You are target for any incoming vehicle because you have to spend additional time in the dangerous opposing lane. The market for removing those devices will be lucrative.
After their introduction to the US markets I can see these vehicles in Texas having a near zero market share.
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.
Of the 520 drivers, just five considered that they were worse than average – fewer than 1%. The rest – even the truly abysmal drivers who were constantly making errors – considered themselves to be at least as good as the next person, and many thought they were a lot better. It was, essentially, a mass delusion that rendered them completely blind to their own failings [1].
Thanks for the reminder that most people overestimate their own skill levels and tend to think they are better than others than they are in reality.
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.
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.