All new cars must have the devices from 7 July, adding fuel economy as well as safety. Will mpg become the new mph?
In the highway code and the law courts, there is no doubt what those big numbers in red circles mean. As a quick trip up any urban street or motorway with no enforcement cameras makes clear though, many drivers still regard speed signs as an aspiration rather than a limit.
Technology that will be required across Europe from this weekend may change that culture, because from 7 July all new cars sold in the EU and in Northern Ireland must have a range of technical safety features fitted as standard. The most notable of these is intelligent speed assistance – or colloquially, a speed limiter.
The rest of the UK is theoretically free, as ministers once liked to put it, to make the most of its post-Brexit freedoms, but the integrated nature of car manufacturing means new vehicles here will also be telling their drivers to take their foot off the accelerator. Combining satnav maps with a forward camera to read the road signs, they will automatically sound an alarm if driven too fast for the zone they are in.
Is it a little beep or a constant alarm? I can’t imagine that many drivers would tolerate having a constant alarm.
I’m in the USA and my impression here is that currently safety advocates are happy to set very low speed limits, drivers are happy to ignore those speed limits, and so everything works out. If speed limits were actually consistently enforced, I imagine there would be a lot of push-back against the politicians responsible.
We need to breed a new generation of drivers who find driving in a more relaxed manner can be just as rewarding.
I don’t see that happening.
Road engineers are happy to design streets to encourage higher speeds than is safe as well.
Come to my town. If you obey the speed limit you hit almost every light on red. Do 5-10 mph over and you hit most on green.
If you are at a red, the light will not change most times until there is a decent amount of traffic coming from another direction. When they get closer, they will get a red and you get a green. Making them stop.
I want to meet the idiots who designed this system.
Sounds like it should be the exact opposite. In a road in a city near here they have leds installed in the streets and everything set for a green wave. If you drive in the green zone of the LEDs, you will have all lights green. It was a proof of concept and pretty cool imho.
The speed limits are low because nobody respects them anyway. You could make actual meaningful speed limits if everyone would drive them.
I think people drive at speeds their comfortable with not some arbitrary number over any posted limit. In my state, they limit freeway speeds to 65MPH but I’ll usually do 75-80MPH in a big chain with all the other people commuting. Last time we were in Montana, the posted limit was 80MPH and I still only drove 75-80MPH because I feel comfortable at that speed.
Yeah in one of my previous cars you could set a speed above which the car would warn. I tried it and above the set speed the alarm would constantly sound. This was probably the initial implementation. The car also had an assist camera to avoid low speed collisions. So all the tech was already in the car… that was a Skoda from 2013.
