I am not a “muh freedom” guy, I don’t drive more than 10 over anyway. But this is just logistically a bad way to stop speeding.
Where does my car get the current speed limit information? How and when does it update as speed limits change? Will school systems around the country have to submit a list of which days are “school days” for school zone speed limits?
What if the GPS registers you on the 30mph road below or next to the 70mph highway, long term or even for a momentary glitch? Who is at fault if that causes you to be in an accident?
Just glossing over implementation. So every car will have to have wireless communications of some sort? Will there be some government system that all California cars will have to be integrated with that tracks where they are at all times so the car can know the correct speed limit? A tracking system that surely would never be abused or turned into a surveillance device.
“I don’t think it’s at all an overreach, and I don’t think most people would view it as an overreach, we have speed limits, I think most people support speed limits because people know that speed kills,” Wiener said.
Not unless they think about it for five seconds.
Speed doesn’t kill.
It’s the sudden stop that kills you.
Be careful, or politicians are gonna draft a bill preventing your from applying too much braking force too quickly. Thats about in line with the logic on this bill.
Funny enough, they already did long ago. It’s call ABS. :)
Doesn’t abs make you stop sooner than both slamming on locking braks or manually pumping them? Idk sounds like more of a sudden stop to me, congress gonna ban ABS next
ABS also shortens your stopping distance. At least good ABS does, originally it sucked.
Belter slingshot racers know this all too well. NOTE: Spoiler for an episode in the Expanse which everyone should watch if they haven’t already.
…or the sudden start.
Lol correct. Speed doesn’t kill, acceleration does
One of our cars uses GPS and a lookup to show the current speed limit on the dash. It’s often wrong. This will not go well.
You realize your car already knows what speed it’s driving without GPS, right?
I don’t think you’re following the implication.
What, that up to date speed databases are an impossible problem to solve? Or that you couldn’t possibly get current speed limits from a non-GPS method? These aren’t hard problems.
If it’s not a hard problem, it wouldn’t happen.
You’d be amazed how many problems can be solved when the people involved have legal liability. My first GPS unit was out of date from the moment I bought it. It wasn’t because keeping a map up to date was hard, it was because they didn’t care, you’d already bought the GPS and it was better than not having one at all. This isn’t a technological problem.
Your car’s GPS-localized speed map is wrong because no one cares enough to make it right, not because it’s an unsolvable problem. It’s a gimmick to get you to buy the car, and you already bought the car.
Sure, the car knows its forward speed from its speedometer.
It doesn’t know the speed limit of the road it’s currently riding on, that’s not as easy to directly measure. Currently the most straightforward way to do this is have it look up its location using GPS, use that data to look up what road the car is driving on, and then look up the speed limit for that section of road. This is far from error prone; GPS isn’t perfect and could, for example, confuse your current position for another road nearby; it might think you’re on a slip road next to the interstate you’re driving on, or think you’re on rather than under an overpass, that sort of thing. The database might be out of date or in error, the data connection to that database might be unreliable…
The California legislative process: First, say something totally reasonable. “People should be able to tell if the products they buy contain poisonous or carcinogenic chemicals, let’s require consumer goods that contain hazardous chemicals to bear a label describing them as such.” Next, do absolutely no research, consult no technicians or engineers, only lawyers and yoga instructors get a say. Once you’ve got all the spelling errors ironed out, have it carved into adamantium so that it’s more permanent than god. Finally, strictly enforce the letter of the law in any way it could be interpreted. Which is why literally every single product that might get sold in California up to and including bottles of mineral water all say THIS PRODUCT CONTAINS CHEMICALS KNOWN IN THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA TO CAUSE CANCER on the label, and since literally every manufactured good is labeled as hazardous, consumers have exactly no more information than they used to.
I’m a software engineer with colleagues who work with various localization and short range communication. This is totally technologically feasible. All the “what if it’s not sure” cases just default to the higher limit. It won’t be sufficient for self-driving cars to know how fast to drive, but it will prevent the vast majority of excessive speeding.
The what-ifs are just people either flailing around to not have their speeding curtailed or people who assume half-assed apps from companies that don’t have any reason to care if they’re right are the state of the art. They always come up with absurd reasons why they need to speed or why implementation is impossible whenever any road safety improvement is proposed. It’s a boring and pathological response.
Every car I’ve hired in the last ten years has the current speed limit displayed on the dashboard. It does not require the car to communicate any information, only to receive it.
That is a different question from how car manufacturers could abuse the requirement to get more data to sell, of course. But there’s nothing in this bill that would require the car to collect any data that isn’t already publicly displayed by the roadside.
I haven’t read the article, so just spitballing here: I have to assume the approach here is to electronically govern the engine to go no faster than the highest speed limit. I don’t know what the limits are in California, but where I live that’d mean the car would be limited to 80mph. If it was electronic, it could be adjusted if then limits were changed.
Otherwise, it’d be insane, and require the crazy infrastructure you describe. And they simply don’t have the money or the wherewithal to build an actual coverage that would allow the limiter to dynamically scale all the time.
Alternatively, I suppose you could imagine a hybrid system—ie an overall limited engine to the max limit, and then some sort of transponder that would throttle the limit down if you were near an important speed limit zone, like a school, which they could manage to deploy a transmitter at… still seems technologically challenging for the state to really pull off consistently though.
Either way, yeah not a fan or including more required tracking tech in vehicles. I don’t think I’d really hate a reasonably limited car—I really can’t justify needing to drive over 80 ever really, even in an emergency, but it would drive me insane to have the car just magically throttling down whenever it thought it was time to. See
One way I could think to implement it without any tracking or data connection connection with no data being transmitted from the vehicle would be by placing infrared strobe lights periodically along the road, possibly at the same places we already have speed limit signs. The flashing is invisible to the human eye but could be picked up by cameras on the vehicle, vary the speed or pattern of the strobe to indicate a different speed limit.
Something pretty similar is already used by a lot of emergency vehicles to trigger green lights, just the arrangement is reversed with a strobe on the vehicle and a sensor on the traffic signal.
Of course such a system would potentially be vulnerable to things like power outages (strobe can’t strobe if it doesn’t have power) bad weather (heavy fog, or if the camera and/orr strobe are covered in snow,) and someone could potentially circumvent it by just mounting a strobe light on their car pointed at the camera.
You could probably address the snow/fog issue by locking the car to a lower speed if no strobe is detected, maybe 25 or 35mph, because in those conditions people should generally be driving slower anyway, and then you don’t have the expense of needing to put strobes around lower speed areas. And the power issue could be addressed with the kind of solar panels and/or backup batteries that already power some streetlights and such.
And for those who tamper with the system to circumvent it, we’re never going to stop speeders entirely, but we can increase the fines to make up for lost revenue to keep police departments happy, they make less traffic stops and rake in the same amount of money.
The infrastructure limitation could be resolved by using infrared reflectors along the road instead of lights. Have the car shine infrared light at the reflectors so it’s cameras can read the code on them (like an infrared QR code, maybe?)
Mechanical governors for ICE vehicles have been around for over 120 years. It wouldn’t be hard to make an electronic version for e-vehicles.
Did you think about this for even 5 seconds?
Will there be some government system that all California cars will have to be integrated with that tracks where they are at all times
We have that already. They are digital license plates. It’s voluntary right now fortunately.
Folks… it’s available as a subscriptionnn!!!
I really don’t understand why this is a product at all. What value does it provide me for $250/yr?
Saves a few seconds of applying registration stickers every year?
Anti-theft…
Kinda makes sense for fleet vehicles I think, where you’re already installing trackers anyway.
Privacy nightmare for personal vehicles!
I’ll buy the argument on a fleet vehicle. But I miss any reasonable use case that justifies the price for Joe Blow the consumer.
There is already a good amount of wireless in most cars. We’ve had standards since the Bush administration for cars to wirelessly communicate with each other.
I personally can’t wait to start hacking cars going by on the freeway to make their top speed a negative value.
That’s going to be so much fun.
Similar things have already been done.
https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/
Oh yeah, I know.
I heard that some countries have zero leeway for speed limit trespassing, like if it says 100 and you go 101 that’s a fine time. I don’t understand why that’s not the case in other places, why not increase the limit by that 10 mph/kmph you allow now and stop allowing speeding at all
Because car speedometers are not calibrated by law, and can be off a few percent. Changes in temperature can change tire radius as well.
After all that you then get into court proceeding of proving speed gun calibration has to be perfect.
And again, you don’t need to go exactly at the [increased] limit, you can go below it and allow for speedometer being not exactly correct
I don’t understand why that’s not the case in other places
the auto industry lobby.
The issue with this is because it doesn’t work for the actual purpose of speed limits in the US. If the goal was to set the limit at the maximum speed that is safe for that road and then not exceed it then zero tolerance would work. In the real world though speed limits aren’t about safety at all, they are purely revenue generation for police departments. They are 100% set with the intent of having people break them so that the local government can make money. People obeying a speed limit 100% of the time would literally break every single local government in the US, the current system literally can’t exist if people don’t speed.
In California, local government does not get any revenue from speeding tickets. It is one reason there is so little enforcement of traffic laws.
People will always push the limits. That leeway is there for specific situations where you’d need to speed up to avoid something or even for those who are slightly speeding without realising
The second part seems like it could be fixed by people not trying to drive as fast as they can, imo
The first one, well, now in those specific situations they just need to speed up even more because everyone is already driving limit + whatever is allowed ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Lots of people arguing about the practicality of this, or whether it can be done without invading privacy or slippery-sloping into mass surveillance.
The thing is: Even if it could be done perfectly — giving instant leeway when emergencies occur, being perfectly private forever, with perfectly accurate sensors — I still don’t think we’d want it.
That’s because laws are not just mechanical things. They are social things. When we put up a speed limit sign, it’s not just to configure a number in the driver’s mind. It’s to remind them to think about how they’re interacting with the community around them.
De-emphasizing that responsibility runs counter to this social purpose, which I think we intuitively understand at some level even if we reflexively bring out other claims in order to object to the policy.
How about let people actually own the fucking car they purchase
You will own nothing and be happy
There are plenty of rules your car has to comply with in order to use public roads.
Rules are different from taking direct control away from the driver.
How about also 50 km/h hard limit in city?
I saw a video yesterday of cars fleeing the 2011 tsunami in Japan, I’m willing to bet those people exceeded 10mph over the posted speed limit trying to get away from the water.
Limiting the speed of the vehicles isn’t going to improve driving skills or eliminate distractions. It isn’t going to make people drive safer, just slower. I’m sure any situation where people need to go 10+ miles over the speed limit is going to be exceedingly rare and limited to things like fleeing forest fires or tsunamis, but limiting the speed isn’t going to have a huge impact on accidents.
It could decrease fuel consumption and emissions though 🤷♂️.
But it still seems like a problem that could be solved with better enforcement.There are reasons other than natural disasters that happen all the time. Health emergencies are a fine example of this. Yes, ideally you’d wait for an ambulance but oft times that’s just not viable.
People speeding in your neighborhood is a rich people problem. Guess who’s putting themselves first in their own legislation?
Isn’t that just going to cause accidents? For all the non regulated cars on the highway, what happens if you need to merge into a lane where the flow of traffic is faster than the speed limit? It doesn’t even have to be a highway, but lane changes in any city can have that problem I imagine.
I can only imagine going to pass and failing to do so in as timeless manner as needs to occur…
That would make passing so much more dangerous as people are in the other lane even longer.
Come on guys it is old technology, it will be soon the case in EU :
From july 2024 all new cars will have an intelligent GPS which prevents driver that the speed limit is exceeded (the gas pedal will be stronger). of course you can disable it, but you have to do it every time you start.
Can’t wait to see drivers panic because they can’t speed up in 30km/h areas (like around schools)
Edit for clarity: can’t, not can. please respect people’s lives in sensible areas (cities), be conscious that you can easily kill someone with your 1,5T armour. And speed up as much as you want on empty highways if you enjoy it
Good.
Why would you need a car that can go 200mph? Where are you going to use it? Oh yeah typically in school zones or some shit. If the limit is 50mph, ITS FOR A FUCKING REASON.
Also, US cites and states, START DESIGNING YOUR ROADS FOR THE SPEED YOU NEED. If you design a road next to a school like a highway, don’t be surprised when people drive 70mph. This simple idea is used all over the place in the Netherlands and guess what? IT FUCKING WORKS BECAUSE IT MAKES FUCKING SENSE .
/rant
Absolutely horrendous. And if I can hack it out or jailbreak it I would.
And on the flipside I doubt the system for enforcing it would be particularly safe. GPS locations can be spoofed and some kind of transmitter in the sign can be stolen and moved somewhere else if not replicated outright. All a bad actor would have to do to cause a pileup would be to suddenly turn a 60mph zone into a 20mph zone at an opportune moment.
This tech should be developed and used to stop chase vehicles. Also if it is used to stop people from going 10 over then we shouldn’t have cops checking people’s speed anymore.
I actually quite dislike cars but this is fucking insane
Authoritarian nonsense.
