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.
I don’t see that happening.
there are many people who don’t want to drive, don’t care about the act of driving, and don’t respect the vehicle.
it would help if these people weren’t forced to drive.
Probably a constant ding sound. At least that’s how it used to be on some vehicles if you exceeded a certain speed in Japan.
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.