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US National Transportation Safety Board calls on automakers to install speed-limiting tech in new vehicles
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- Title
- Nine Killed By One Speeding Car Sparks Fed To Call For Speed-Restrictors
- Published
- Nov 16 2023
- Word count
- 563 words
While I very much doubt this happens in any meaningful way, if it does I'd say it's a few weeks before police start using it to send tickets or get warrants. Monitoring GPS like this is such a bad idea, and that's before you get into updates/concerning situations/whatever.
Automatic tickets for speeding could have been done on toll roads all along, since it’s easy to calculate the minimum time the trip could possibly take while driving legally. I assume it didn’t happen due to politics - most drivers would be against it, presumably.
It would be rather surprising if it happened first in the US, rather than in some more law-abiding country.
Something I was thinking about the other day. Was driving along the WV Turnpike (and had gone up part of the PA Turnpike a couple weeks before) with an EZPass. They know my check in times at each gate. It definitely had me thinking. However, I don't think I see as many police on the Turnpikes as off - I almost feel like it's an implicit permission to speed moderately (since there's less traffic than the non-Turnpike and hence easier to do so) in exchange for the toll payment, in a way.
Nothing is illegal if you can afford the fine.
Enforcing speeding laws on the toll road is a surefire way to coerce drivers to stick to the free roads. You pay for the privilege of not being hassled by cops.
Who says there's anything to monitor? Your car simply has some GPS receivers in it, and it sets the governor based on your GPS coordinates. And speed trap cities would actually despise this technology. Currently, small towns can enact low speed limits and then selectively enforce them against outsiders. If cars are GPS governor-limited, the towns can still set their speed limits. However, they will have to abide by the speed limits as well, as all vehicles within city limits will be subject to the city-mandated speed limits.
And again, sending tickets? This would vastly decrease police ticket revenue. You would never have to pay for a speeding ticket again, your car simply wouldn't allow itself to speed. In turn, police resources can be redirected from traffic enforcement to other currently neglected areas, like policing robberies and vehicle break-ins.
Also, be aware that your phone and vehicle already track you wherever you go. Every new car has GPS built into it. The police can already track you using this or license plate readers if they want. The police can seize your phone and get access to your location data. This system would simply be connecting your car's existing GPS system to its speed control system.
Finally, there's nothing saying that such a GPS governor needs to have any location tracking built into it at all. It could simply continuously monitor its position and then set the governor accordingly. There's zero reason to require it to track your location. Some manufacturers might still build it that way, but there's no reason the tech needs to be built that way.
Today, while driving down a 50mph road, my GPS assumed I did a sick spin and flew fifty yards to a pedestrian side road which was likely 25/30mph. If my car suddenly decided I was now doing 20mph over the speed limit and brake checked me, causing an accident, who is at fault?
I am not. The GPS only provided the info it had. The auto maker programmed the car to manage its speed, so take it up with either... Honda corporate or the US government. I'm sure Liberty Mutual would love to take that case to court.
The end of the day, until we have actual self driving with strict government standards, I will NEVER want a machine or subsystem of a computer responsible for my two tons of metal death. That's not even counting the number of times I can count in the last six months my whole 'infotainment' system decided to reboot while mid drive. Do you trust your roads to something people describe as infotainment?
Drivers are bad but computers are too.
The governor is only as accurate as the most recent data. How long until "i was just doing what the car let me" becomes the excuse when small speed trap towns change their speed limit twice a year because they know it's not going to be updated for 6 months (as we already have major issues keeping this data accurate). It also leads to questions about handling zones like construction.
I very much doubt police ticket revenue is going to vanish. Again you'll just see them camping on construction/school/whatever zones that don't get updated into the system frequently. And that's decades after mass adoption as there will still be plenty of cars that can go however fast they want.
Which leads to my next point about how dangerous it's going to be if you're on one of those dumb speed trap roads going 30 when everyone else is going 60. We have several areas I can think of on the drives between cities that are extremely dangerous because of this, and until full adoption such a system is only going to make it worse. Going with the flow of traffic is safer than being VASTLY outside of it.
Yes we are already tracked to hell and back. I think most of it should be illegal for a variety of reasons and am certainly never going to be in favor of expanding an already bad idea.
Yes it will need to track your location simply because the first time this screws up or someone thinks it screwed up and someone gets hurt (which WILL happen, even if it's vastly better than i think, stats just aren't on your side) you'll need proof it was working correctly. And that's before the aforementioned gold mine of information this will be.
I don’t have a horse in the race here, but my vehicle updates traffic speed zone indication (as seen on my dash console) with the camera built into the windshield. It updates every time I pass a new sign, so GPS with cellular data isn’t the only way for your car to determine posted speed limits whether in a construction zone or otherwise.
While i'm aware this is tech that exists, it also points to the other question:
Who should have more influence over the vehicle? The driver or some arbitrary input?
Because these systems that read signs are in the 90%+ accurate range, but what do you do when there's a tree over it, or someone vandalizes it, or whatever? We're back to "we don't trust the driver so we're going to trust an arbitrary database/parsing mechanism" which leads to a whole slew of other issues when someone gets hurt or killed because suddenly their car dropped to 20 mph on a freeway because the camera was blocked or damaged.
that camera in my 2019 Honda insight has reports the wrong values all the time, and one time it said the limit was 100mph.
apparently, there is no logic in the system that says "hey, we know there are no 100mph zones in the US, so maybe we shouldn't let the car tell the driver that they are in one".
Another thread was talking about installing speed limiters in cars themselves to increase pedestrian/cyclist safety. There were some reactions that it would be dystopian and unrealistic, and other reactions that it would be practical and net-positive. I am not sure I have an opinion on this specific method of reducing car speed, or to what precise extent it would be implemented. However, it is important that we reduce speed somehow, at least from extremes.
Regulators appear to be shifting toward more aggressive speed-limiting technology (with caveats).
I don't know why the article has so many hyperlinks but here is a summary of the NTSB's recommendation from their press release:
It's not clear to me whether these "recommendations" are binding (though Title 49.B.VIII § 800.32 Initiation of rulemaking seems to imply that they have regulatory authority in and of themselves?). Either way I would be surprised if they were completely ignored.
I can envision some privacy concerns with the data collection involved in these systems, although to some extent that seems like a separate problem with the way personal data is allowed to be handled in the US. Automakers have already voluntarily installed loads of spyware in new cars, after all. I think we probably need stricter data privacy laws in general.
I have a lot of issues with some proposed implementations of this, and not a lot of issues with others.
Firstly, modern cars are extremely powerful, and I think they should have governors on their top speeds on public roads. You cannot safely control a car anywhere on public roads in America at 150+ mph, period. There's no practical reason why cars should ever be able or allowed to go that fast anywhere but closed, monitored racetracks. Many new cards can exceed those speeds though, which is absolutely insane to me. I don't have any issue with a blanket requirement of governors limiting top speeds to 150 or 140 mph.
I do have issues with some of the drastic proposals; that is, top speeds being GPS limited to the speed limit. That kind of technology is much more complex, and requires a deep integration between the ECU and the navigation unit. There are so, so many things that can go wrong when you require your car to receive satellite signals triangulating its position to determine how fast its allowed to go. My GPS has thought I was in the middle of a lake before. Sometimes it randomly thinks I'm going the wrong way for some reason. A lot of times, it can't receive a signal at all. I don't want something so immensely complex to be responsible for the basic operation of my car.
Also, I'm a free, rational person. I should be allowed to break the law if I deem it necessary. If my kid has a grievous injury and is bleeding out in the passenger seat of my car and I'm rushing him to the hospital, some asshole in Washington DC forcing me to go down an empty well lit street at 2am at 20mph is going to feel my wrath.
If some nutjob with a gun starts firing at me on the highway, I should be able to exceed the speed limit to get away from him.
I think a much better solution to excessive vehicle speeds is to design places where private vehicles aren't required, and where it's not practical to drive them quickly, not to install some pretty draconian, and undoubtedly buggy one size fits all monitoring system.
Out of curiosity, why do you draw the line at 150 mph and not at, say, 90 mph? Or 75 mph?
Fair points about technology.
The NTSB says that there are a variety of active speed-limiting systems. They say: "Active systems include mechanisms that make it more difficult, but not impossible, to increase the speed of a vehicle above the posted speed limit." And there are other limiters that make it physically impossible to go faster. I think that these regulations would mostly be the first kind, up to a certain speed, but I'm not sure.
I understand why you would individually want to be able to break legal speed limits. But it's worth noting that by speeding, even to save your child's life, you are technically putting other people's lives in danger too. For instance, ambulances kill people when they speed. State regulations usually allow them to speed in emergencies, but only if "life or property is not endangered."
As an individual person stressed out about your kid, I'm not sure you would necessarily be the most impartial judge of whether you are "endangering [the] life" of a person outside the vehicle.
Did you know the 2004 Dodge Neon has a governor? At 120mph, the engine cuts out until it reduces to 115mph and then it lights back up again and you can gun it back up to the limit if you want where it will cut out again.
So, that's an 'active' method. You can just set the cruise control at 115mph and it'll sit there, no questions.
Now, I drove a newish model Tahoe with the more passive variety of speed limiter. At 100kph it'll ping one time and the dash will display an "Excessive Speed Warning" on it. That's it. Now, the speed limit was 120kph on the road, so not only was it annoying, it was wrong. Also, it only dinged once for every time you exceeded the limit - so you were only penalized if you dropped below and above 100kph multiple times, otherwise it was easy with to ignore...
So, for the US, let's imagine we're going to manage top speed... Top speed where? There's 85mph roads out west but plenty of East Coast places top at 55/65mph. So, if you buy a car and decide to go on a road trip are you going to have a 'dumb' cap that repeated annoys you at less than the posted speed limit? If you're able to manually adjust the limit, couldn't everyone just set it to West Coast speed? If you say that only a dealer can adjust the limit for you, well there goes right to repair!
I should be clarify that I'm not against the limits, honestly, but emotionally I'm completely opposed. I know that it would likely save even one life, so that makes me think it's good, but I can't see a 'pro-consumer' way that it could be implemented in America. But, right now, a sixteen year old can get behind the wheel of an F250, Tesla Model S, or 911 GT3RS and the only thing stopping them is money.
That said, a Mazda 3 and still do a hit and run at 90mph on a city surface road - so the problem is bigger than just legislating super cars out of the hands of rich kids but it sounds like political suicide to advocate for the government to have a say between your foot and the accelerator... But if we can legislate between a woman and her doctor, wouldn't the good Christian thing to do be to it?
Such an American problem, huh? Honestly, if someone starts shooting at you, you need bulletproof panels and glass. Regulators should require standard up armored fitting for U.S. cars in this case, maybe not full mine resistant fittings but as someone who's driven armored Toyotas, they're much better at shrugging off rounds than you would be trying to out run them.
Bulletproof glass increases safety against bullets, but sharply decreases safety against rivers, or if the car starts burning - often smashing the window is the safest method of exiting the car, because if you're at the bottom of a river the outside pressure of the water is higher than the inside air-pressure, and thus you can't manually open the door. Powered doors are even worse, because most cars' electronics systems fare poorly when under 2 metres of water.
Uh, everyone knows that's why you rig a blow off rear hatch and plan your egress route based on expected enemy forms of contact. If your adversary primarily tries to force you into rivers, you just need to ensure your trail vehicle is equipped with an underwater rescue kit and have your SCUBA at the ready. Besides, in America at least, gun deaths are likely a higher chance than a water submersion event. Think about the children, won't you? Doesn't ever kid in America deserve a rolling panic room on wheels?
CDC says about 4,000 Americans drown every year vs the 48,000ish gun deaths. Why go after the small potatoes like 'water safety' when we can effectively upcharge more for the federally mandated 'Ballistic Armor Sport Edition' package?
150mph is 240km/h
I often wonder if it's the 'speed' that's the driving force. I can go insanely fast on my motorbike, but I choose not to generally. Acceleration from 0-60 in 3ish seconds? Absolutely using that to get away on a motorway.
Now it gets a bit different when you've got 2 tonnes of Porche being able to do that on roads that aren't designed for it with drivers who aren't trained for it. You end up causing carnage.
Motorbike licences in the UK (And EU) have what's called an A or A2. A is "Go and buy 1200cc and have a laugh", but you've got to be 24. A2 is for 24 year olds and under and is restricted to a specific acceleration, not speed (generally). That seems to stop hooners (unless they take their kit our post-MOT), but unless you're enforcing it? It's just regulations really.
But I think we're often missing the point. People buy cars they simply do not need.
I've spoken of my neighbour before as he's got five vehicles. A massive Porche, a Land Rover Evoque, A BMW 1 Series and a BMW 4 Series and a Transit van for 'work';. They're all sub-5 years old and he's regularly hooning up and down my little bit of my city and causing problems (or driving round the corner to the chicken shop.) The speed he yangs out of junctions and then sits at on residential roads is not safe (it's 40+), but no-one enforces his speed and the speed tables do nothing to his wide wheelbase Porche.
But he does not need that many cars. It's him, his wife and one kid at home. Why does he need four extremely powerful cars to the detriment of everyone else around him (I've seen him drive and encountered it... and had words afterwards).
My wife and I on the other hand? 1.4L little city runner that she uses to get to and from work on the daily. We've got us two and our dog. That's it. I'd argue that he has no need for the big, scary, acceleration, torquematic excusemobiles that he drives and should be relegated to driving nothing more powerful than a 1.6L.
We give far too much free reign to cars (and their manufacturers) that what they build is actually 'okay' for our roads. Then we give complete leeway to folks who go and buy shit loads of cars for no reason than to show off by hooning it around on the same damn streets day in and day out.
So don't just regulate the speed, regulate the size, shape, engine size, acceleration and ownership of these bloody things. Want a hoon-mobile? Guess who's paying 25% of the value of the vehicle (new) in tax every year?
And to stop anyone ranting. My motorbike is a Tracer 900. I ride around 200 - 500 miles per week when I need to go to the office. It's a necessary evil.
The equation to consider is
F=mv. Speed has an equal effect on the force of a collision as the mass of the vehicle does. Larger (heavier) cars in particular are less safe to drive at a given speed than small cars. If we want to take a physics-based approach, these internal speed limiters should have different allowed speed limits based on the size of the vehicle. i.e. they would look at the overall posted speed limit and then assign a positive or negative offset based on the vehicle's mass.Agreed. The US does have some weight-based registration fees, but they're really low. A more reasonable system would have an exponential fee scaling with automobile mass, with obvious exceptions for use-cases where people actually need a large vehicle, like commercial uses for a small business. In general, regular people should not be driving cars larger than a sedan. If they want to, they should have to pay for it (and, IMO, they should have to get a different and more stringent auto license).
(The following is Newtonian mechanics nitpicking which does not affect—indeed, reinforces—your underlying point.)
There's no such equation; momentum is equal to the product of mass and velocity (
p=mv), while force is mass times acceleration (F=ma). The latter is why braking to a halt is harmless while crashing into a bridge abutment is not: the acceleration is much, much higher in the latter case.But in terms of collision damage, the relevant quantity is kinetic energy, which actually scales with the square of velocity (at least, at non-relativistic speeds):
K=½mv². This means that velocity is the dominating factor of how much damage a car crash can do: doubling the vehicle weight doubles the kinetic energy, but doubling its velocity quadruples the kinetic energy, and the disparity grows from there.(On the other hand, road wear scales with the fourth power of weight, according to a complex empirical model, so controlling that is also essential. Just in general, we need smaller vehicles.)
Thanks for the corrections. I'm not a physics person.
nitpick, but
P=mv,F=ma. Also important isE=1/2mv^2, as energy also has to go somewhere, even if that is mostly absorbed by the crumple zoneI'm fine with that.
I think it's more the issue that folks don't actually know how to drive at these speeds, or do so only because they are so readily available. If you can't get up to 50mph in a short stop of time? You're not going to try.
Source: My petrolhead late brother who had a 1L Fiesta and couldn't hoon if he wanted to.
Yeah, The UK doesn't unfortunately. My wife's care, despite being more polluting due to usage/weight costs £30 per year in Vehicle Excise Duty compared to my bike. Which is just insane.
I want too see large cars regulated out of existence entirely, bring back decent sized family motors that can get you where you need to go quickly, reliably and without disrupting everyone elses day.
But according to the current government, that's the kind of comment that promotes "ThE WaR oN MoToRiStS"
EVs weigh anywhere from 20% to 300% more than their ICE equivalents. It seems like penalizing weight would dramatically discourage EV adoption.
ICE vehicles should be banned at the manufacturer level, and several state laws are already in place phasing them out, notably in California. In other states, many automakers have committed to phasing out ICE production.
Most EVs are dramatically heavier than they need to be because, like ICEs, they are larger than they need to be. Batteries are heavy, but the actual design of the vehicles is mostly aesthetic. If automakers had an incentive to, they could meaningfully decrease the weight and size of these cars while also improving fuel efficiency.
Penalizing weight is still necessary because vehicle mass is a major contributor to pedestrian death. There are situations when automobiles need to go at speeds that could harm people at a given weight; if that weight is decreased, they will harm people less.
What about not allowing everyone to obtain driving licence? Even the dumbest person can get their permit nowadays (figuratively) and such person can driveover other people even in a car that has its speed limited. It's not about cars and it's not about al the tachnology (ABS, self-braking, radars, etc.), it is and always will be about the driver - that's the weakpoint.
Well that is certainly the premise of having licensing requirements. I would be in favor of requiring people to take a driver's test again every 5 or 10 years. Lots of people get their license at 16 and then lose the mechanical ability and mental acuity to properly control a vehicle as they age.
I think that most US states have licensing requirements that are too weak. People are driving large, dangerous vehicles that they can't control. IMO, if you want to drive an SUV or light truck, you should have to get a more difficult license. If you can't be bothered, well, you can drive a sedan with your normal license.
In other threads we have talked about the importance of supplementing this with better transit and development patterns to make driving less relevant. I agree. You have to actually... do both things, though. I think that when people try to deflect this point with "well people don't have alternatives to driving," they implicitly buy into a model that sacrifices the good in hope of achieving perfection, and then they also don't specifically strive to improve their transit/development patterns.
Indeed, many people don't have great alternatives to driving. But I don't know... some of their neighbors don't have cars. They manage. Having more people begin to take transit instead of driving to commute as a result of losing their license for being unable to drive without putting others at risk (key point!!!), even if it's not ideal, gives incentives to agencies and governments to improve those transit services. If there is no transit ridership to begin with, they are unlikely to increase service. (I think they still should increase service either way, but agencies don't always have the literal or political capital to make that happen without increased ridership.)
Scientific meta-analyses demonstrate that efforts to reduce car dependency require "push" factors like restrictions on dangerous driving just as much as they require "pull" factors like creating alternatives to driving. With just one or the other, the changes aren't effective.
Or, at least for me, you forget stuff or didn’t pay attention at 16. And then you’ve got to rely on search results and trying to interpret what you find.
The greatest positive impact on my driving was having to basically go through driver’s Ed again to get a USAREUR license when I was stationed in Germany at 19.
Requires a functional public transport system or you'll get mass riots.
I'm European, so this is no issue, actually. I could live without car, not comfortably, but I could. Even villages of less than 500 people get usable public transport here. Yes, there is a village every few kilometers, the land is full of houses and people, unlike middle USA (or that's what I think, at least).
Maybe even more so is my reasoning kinda based. People here have the means to get around, yet almost everyone gets drivers licence even though they shouldn't have it.
Americans have a perception that their country is too sparsely populated for transit, but this is misleading. It's true that many areas between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River (out west) are completely empty, but even then there are plenty of dense hotspots, like Colorado's Front Range and the Texas Triangle. If you look at a demographic map, you can see just how much of the country is populated.
The state of Ohio, a place that most Americans think is just full of fields, has a population density higher than Spain (282/sq mi vs. 229/sq mi respectively). Wyoming doesn't, but very few people live in Wyoming. Florida has some of the most car-centric design in the country despite having a population density of 402/sq mi, which is similar to New York State and England.
Plenty of European countries, like Spain and much of France, are not particularly dense overall and yet manage to have amazing high-speed rail networks. Outside of cities, they often manage to have more local transit than comparably dense American municipalities because they actually fund transit services (important) and because they are more intentional about their local development patterns.
I question how true this is or how useful of a metric, since Ohio is pretty well known at the very least thanks to being the largest swing state, and by extension it's not really a secret it's a well populated state. I don't think anyone I've ever met would associate Ohio with "fields" before the usuals like Kansas/Nebraska/Oklahoma/etc.
My point was that most Americans do not intuitively consider Ohio to be particularly metropolitan even if it is a “swing state” (also, being a swing state is completely unrelated to population).
More importantly Ohio is considered an extremely average place—if there were a statewide equivalent to the expression “Will it play in Peoria?” it would be “Would it occur in Ohio?” (Peoria is in Illinois, but so is Chicago, which is why I didn’t quote Illinois’ density: it’s more monocentric than Ohio.) The meme about Ohio “not being real” refers to the fact that, as far as many Americans are concerned, its existence has no impact on their life. (This is wrong, but it is still their perception.)
Ohio’s normalcy, genericness, and in fact its relative political neutrality as a swing state reinforce its happenstance status as car-centric as the reality for the entire country. That is, people associate places like Ohio and its car-dependence with “America” in general, not realizing that the state’s car-dependency could absolutely be changed and by extension that any vaguely “similar” state could also be improved.
Which is why i clarified the largest swing state. The fact it's the largest swing state means that even people who don't think about middle America much are aware of it, and that it's not some empty field filled grass land like Kansas.
As for the rest, I don't think I agree but I guess I see where you're coming from.
Would the majority of drivers actually bother to modify the systems of their vehicles that stop them from going above posted speed limits though? I see your point, but I think the answer is... no.
People "want" to do all sorts of things with their phones or computers but rarely actually do anything about it. People don't like watching ads online, but I don't think the majority of people even know what an adblocker is, nor have they ever bothered to look for a way to remove ads. Not sure cars are really different.
Enthusiasts might seek to break the rules, but if doing so voids your manufacturer warranty, I can't see most consumers following suit.
Do big trucks 'roll coal' enough to have a negative impact? Of course. People will. Maybe not that majority of people but enough that a day barely goes by without seeing at least one.
This was my first thought too. People make illegal and warranty-voiding vehicle modifications all the time.
This feels like it may, in hindsight, be an inflection point in the current American "culture wars". For all the reasons people say "car culture" is dangerous, this is going to hit exactly on the pain points.
It’s easy to imagine which side Republicans will take. I have no idea whether enough Democrats will take the other side to make it a culture war issue, or if it never gets much political traction at all.
I suppose Republicans would still run against it even if there’s little support.
Maybe California will mandate it? California goes first on a lot of things, and Democrats are in charge.
I would describe myself as to the left of the Democratic Party, and I'm firmly against it. Cars need to be dumber, not smarter. We need to regulate large, heavy vehicles out of existence and not hand licenses out like candy. As others have pointed out in the same thread: at the same speed limit, doubling the weight of the vehicle doubles the kinetic energy in an impact. Road damage also is the fourth power of axle weight.
Speed is less important and should be dealt with through better traffic design: narrower roads and more roundabouts where they're called for. It should be naturally difficult to speed in areas where there are many pedestrians, and separation of roads from pedestrians is also a crucial part of urban planning.
I'm a liberal and I think like-minded people will fall on the side of whatever preserves the most human life. Car accidents are a stupid attrition of innocent lives we've all accepted as a part of society because tax-funded public transportation is communist.
But, think about it more like collective punishment than altruistic advancement. I keep my hands at 10 and 2ish, I don't speed and I don't text and drive. Now imagine that the NTSB calls on automakers to include a system that will continuously beep if both your hands aren't on the wheel. So, I (a 'good driver') can't have a drink of water anymore because Todd can't keep off his phone and his Altima in the lines?
I know that a system that annoying would probably save a life but holy fuck that would make my drives miserable.
Now, again I'm not against these ideas of limits but, this is how you get NIMBY behavior from otherwise 'liberal' people.
I'm sure that mandating that everyone have a breathalyzer interlock would save lives too but I can't see many people supporting that.
Unfortunately, mandatory breathalyzers already have been signed into law, effective in 2026. So everyone gets a major annoyance that will likely not even solve the problem it seeks to. It might even cost lives from malfunctions.
https://jalopnik.com/the-in-car-breathalyzer-is-only-a-few-years-away-1850268311
Ha! Fuck. I had a buddy with an interlock (because he was a fucking idiot, no excuses) and about half the time that thing would lock up in the cold.
How would this even work? What if the driver is sober but the car is full of drunk passengers?
I didn’t know this was already on the books nor have I heard anything about the tech.
The non-blowing methods I’ve heard of mostly revolve around sensors that would measure BAC through the skin.
I think my favorite way to limit speeds would be to either use cameras/AI or RFID tags (prefer rfid, I’ve also seen some people mention using gps to get the speed limit but in my opinion that would require an unrealistic level of cooperation by basically every government entity responsible for setting speed limits in the country/world) to identify speed limit signs, and when the car is traveling at or around the speed limit, apply a resistance to the accelerator pedal so you have to consciously “push through” the speed limit if you need to go faster for some reason.
I actually think I remember reading Europe is already doing this.
I'm very pro-:
Research shows that severity of punishment doesn't significantly deter unlawful behavior — but certainty and swiftness of punishment certainly does. It's probably why people have no qualms about driving 10mph above the posted speed limit, but will immediately slow down at the sight of a speed trap.
I'm fairly young still, and I already know a handful of people from childhood who have been killed in car crashes, and I myself was almost killed by street racers two years ago while cycling.
Some people decry it as a police state, but I think it's insane how we have acclimated to our current state of urban terror. Our homes are surrounded by asphalt canyons of mechanical death and maiming.
The US automobile-related death rate of 12.9 per 100k is currently comparable with Egypt (12.8) and Bangladesh (13.6).
Compare to the Netherlands (3.8), Germany (3.7), and Sweden (2.2).
I am a little confused, did you mean to write this in response to my comment?
If they're going to do stuff like this, I wish they'd instead mandate some kind of mandated self-driving protocol (that communicates with other cars, regardless of make) so we can take human drivers out of the whole process altogether.
I don't think self-driving technology has reached a point where humans can be taken out of the equation. I am skeptical that it will ever reach such a point, but I do not know.
With the sole exception of grade-separated highway driving, where there are zero Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs) and where roadways are usually extremely predictable, most streets/roads are full of obstacles that are difficult for machine learning models to understand. You can train a computer to recognize what a bus looks like, but they lack the ability to understand the context of what a bus is or why it behaves the way it does. In cities, pedestrian behavior in particular is quite unpredictable and often changing. Lacking a straight-up general intelligence AI (which doesn't exist, and maybe can't exist), humans are probably better judges of edge cases in complex street environments than machine learning models.
With that said, I am not necessarily opposed to better communication between self-driving vehicles in general. I don't know what such a system would look like.
Why would it be possible that it can’t exist? Especially when you, personally, are an example of general intelligence existing?
I don't know if an artificial general intelligence can exist because general intelligence is not something I or anyone else knows how to fully describe. If it's based on something ethereal, a soul which physicalism cannot define, then we can't really create it physically.
This is not my area. That statement was qualified with "maybe" because I just do not know. In practice, even if it is possible, I am not sure humans would ever be able to create it. I think there are lots of things that are technically possible, like dyson spheres, that we are probably never going to build.
I agree that the tech is not there. That's why I'm saying that if they're going to make some kind of national standard/requirement for cars to include some kind of technology to govern driving, it should go in that direction instead of something half-assed like GPS-related speed limiting. A requirement for self-driving vehicles to communicate with each other and the infrastructure would be part of that.