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Speed limiters now mandatory in all new EU cars

autoweek.com

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Re: Speed limiters now mandatory in all new EU cars

#311

Post by randerson »

zehaeva wrote: post #299
randerson wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Adaptive Cruise Control has 4 distance settings and I use the 3rd, further than most people's following distance, and I've had stones kicked up by truck tires that hit my windscreen from that distance.

I do the same in my Subaru, even at the furthest, the safe distance is choose is no where near the 300feet(approximately 20 car lengths). It's closer to 8 car lengths.

Was curious so I just looked up my car's ACC numbers. Setting 3 is 1.8 seconds and setting 4 (the max) is 2.3 seconds, so about 220 feet at 65mph. As another poster said its pointless to be this far back because everyone else just overtakes you to fill the gap, so you're always braking and accelerating and averaging a smaller distance than in setting 3.

Re: Speed limiters now mandatory in all new EU cars

#312

Post by stavros »

nunez wrote: post #307
stavros wrote: post #63

Leaving aside the concerns about the tech not working well, I'm really not a fan of this pre-crime stuff. This feels very Big Brother, where someone (or some system) is watching over you so you don't break any laws. Things like this lead to cultural ossification and are a nightmare scenario for me.

Well if so many folks didn't speed all the damn time, and if speeding wasn't one of the top cause of vehicular accidents (in the US), then we wouldn't need this

"One of the top" is a nice weasel phrase. Lightning strike is one of the top causes of death in the US too, for a large enough number of causes. Not wearing a seat belt caused more deaths than speeding, yet cars don't refuse to start without a seat belt.

Re: Speed limiters now mandatory in all new EU cars

#313

Post by mikeyouse »

kbolino wrote: post #228
mikeyouse wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because speed limits change and it's easy to measure the before/after impact in terms of the number and the severity of accidents as the average speed in an area changes. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4989038/

Two major confounders for this argument are the raising of national speed limits from the 1970s to the 1990s, during which time traffic accident and fatality rates went down significantly, and the post-COVID bump in traffic accident and fatality rates, during which time, for the most part, no speed limits went up. Without a control, there can be no confidence in the claimed causal link. Moreover, "speed limit" vs "no…

That’s a pretty silly line of thought.. there’s absolutely no need for a “no speed limit” control when speed limits already are just chopping off the higher end of the bell curve of speed distributions.

And clearly there are other causes of accidents and other ways to reduce fatalities (antilock brakes and seatbelts for the period you mentioned) but it’s actually pretty straightforward to assess speed’s influence on accident rates and injuries as shown by the dozens of studies that have found a direct causal relationship. It’s not as if there’s some possibility of a discontinuity where no speed limits means everyone drives slower… especially if you know how speed limits are set in the first place.

Re: Speed limiters now mandatory in all new EU cars

#314

Post by lolinder »

thiht wrote: post #310
avalys wrote: post #87

The problem with automated enforcement of laws like this, is that the laws were not written for 100% automatic enforcement. Everyone who has ever followed a car driving 5 mph below the speed limit on a two-lane road knows that it is basically impossible to ever pass them while staying under the speed limit. Legally, that's what you're supposed to do, but everyone - the police, the legislators, the courts, and drivers…

> everyone - the police, the legislators, the courts, and drivers - understands that in practice it's acceptable to exceed the speed limit a bit when making a pass Not in France. When passing a car, you MUST stay below the speed limit. The only exception would be an immediate danger, like for example if you follow someone visibly drunk. Wanting to pass someone because they drive 5kmh below the speed limit is not an i…

> Speed limits are laws, not suggestions.

This depends a lot on where you live. In much of the US the speed limit only gets enforced at 10mph above the speed limit, which means that 5 under without good reason is actually hazardous—you're actively impeding traffic that wants to be going ~13mph faster than you are.

Re: Speed limiters now mandatory in all new EU cars

#315

Post by lolinder »

novagameco wrote: post #301
its_ethan wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why would you need a gun that shoots people Resisting the urge to be snarky, self defense is a legitimate answer. You may not live somewhere where it's common (or you may not frequently feel unsafe) but wanting the ability to have a weapon to defend yourself (or more commonly to show that you have the ability to defend yourself) from any assailant is a very real thing for people both in the US and around the world.…

I believe there should be stricter gun control, but that people should be allowed to carry other forms of self defense such as pepper spray or tasers (I understand these are illegal in some countries). If we invented a gun which allowed hunters to hunt but somehow didn't let people should other people, I can only see that as a positive

This is all assuming that the control mechanism is impossible to disable, which you know full well is impossible to implement.

If the control mechanism can be disabled then we're back to "if you outlaw guns then only outlaws will have guns".

Re: Speed limiters now mandatory in all new EU cars

#316

Post by temporarely »

gambiting wrote: post #9

This is one example of legislation that mandates fantasy tech that doesn't exist. You'd think that something as simple as speed limiter should be very easy to implement, and it couldn't be further from the truth - watch any review of a car with this tech and every reviewer will complain that it's not the presence of the system that's the problem, it's the fact that it constantly gets the speed limit wrong. Either rea…

Smart(er) roads. A lot of this stuff becomes simpler if there is complementary tech on infrastructure. Instead of relying on reading 20th century tech (signs).

Re: Speed limiters now mandatory in all new EU cars

#317

Post by kerkeslager »

wavemode wrote: post #253
kerkeslager wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The limit of freedom is generally agreed to be "one person's freedom ends when it begins to infringe the freedom of others". Speeding definitely crosses that line. > In this case I would rather have the freedom to intentionally speed (because I need to get my wife to the hospital more quickly, because I'm in the middle of nowhere and want to, or any other reason I deem rational) than be marginally more "safe" thanks…

> The limit of freedom is generally agreed to be "one person's freedom ends when it begins to infringe the freedom of others". Speeding definitely crosses that line. The reason I'm not free to assault others is because I'm directly causing them to lose their right to life and/or well-being. Whereas speeding merely creates a risk of harm, not harm itself. Almost anything could be argued to create a risk of harm to oth…

> The reason I'm not free to assault others is because I'm directly causing them to lose their right to life and/or well-being. Whereas speeding merely creates a risk of harm, not harm itself.

And speeding is illegal. So it seems we as a society have agreed this is not a violation of personal freedoms.

Your argument here is really "speeding is okay and speeding creates risk to others, therefore I should be able to create risk to others"? Do you see how maybe that doesn't work here? Let's start with: "speeding is okay" isn't in evidence. That's the thing you're trying to prove, so you can't just start by saying it's true.

> Almost anything could be argued to create a risk of harm to others, including driving itself. If we outlawed driving, we would certainly be saving a lot of lives.

This isn't an honest argument. Obviously there's some tradeoffs involved, which you know.

Re: Speed limiters now mandatory in all new EU cars

#318

Post by kbolino »

mikeyouse wrote: post #313
kbolino wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two major confounders for this argument are the raising of national speed limits from the 1970s to the 1990s, during which time traffic accident and fatality rates went down significantly, and the post-COVID bump in traffic accident and fatality rates, during which time, for the most part, no speed limits went up. Without a control, there can be no confidence in the claimed causal link. Moreover, "speed limit" vs "no…

That’s a pretty silly line of thought.. there’s absolutely no need for a “no speed limit” control when speed limits already are just chopping off the higher end of the bell curve of speed distributions. And clearly there are other causes of accidents and other ways to reduce fatalities (antilock brakes and seatbelts for the period you mentioned) but it’s actually pretty straightforward to assess speed’s influence on…

The Autobahn has lower accident and fatality rates than U.S. interstates with similar levels of traffic and yet portions of it have no set speed limit at all.

The question is not of speed but speed-related policies and their effect in practice, not in deductively reasoned theory.

Re: Speed limiters now mandatory in all new EU cars

#319

Post by lolinder »

novagameco wrote: post #303
nradov wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You never drive on two-lane rural roads? Getting stuck behind a slow vehicle is torture.

they usually allow passing at specified points

Which are often few, far between, and quite short. If there's any kind of traffic coming the opposite way you can miss your chance over and over again.

Re: Speed limiters now mandatory in all new EU cars

#320

Post by kerkeslager »

its_ethan wrote: post #256
kerkeslager wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, what individual privacy is being surrendered here? Note that observing the driver is in no way necessary to implement a speed limiter.

Yea I've noted that there doesn't have to be a camera pointed at the driver... there does, however, have to be either a GPS and/or camera pointing outwards (that could be used to ID location) in order to know what the current speed limit is for the drivers given location. So the individual privacy at risk is the privacy of not having your location at any given time being knowable to a car manufacturer/ government age…

> [T]here does, however, have to be either a GPS and/or camera pointing outwards (that could be used to ID location) in order to know what the current speed limit is for the drivers given location.

Used by whom? The mechanic who services my car?

I see the problem if the location data is being broadcast to some central server... so don't do that. But that's not necessary for implementation. The ideal implementation in my mind would be to have speed limit signs broadcast speeds on some short-distance frequency and have cars read that passively: much more reliable than cameras, no violation of privacy.

Incidentally, cars broadcasting location to a central server is already a problem--they don't need speed limiting to do that. OnStar has been doing this for decades.

It seems like a lot of HN users who likely happily broadcast their location to Google Maps are suddenly worried about location privacy when it's used to prevent them from speeding. Minor convenience? Sure! Take my privacy! Can't put other people's lives at risk to get to my destination a few seconds faster? How dare you! Privacy is a human right!

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