Considering manufacturers can’t even implement secure keyless entry I’m shocked there isn’t a complete swap in software solutions for all this rubbish. The FOSS community can be pretty damn efficient when their right to modify what they want is taken away.
Maybe there isn’t sufficient overlap between software engineers and petrol heads.
Even though we are out of Europe, we are not out of following EU directives where the UK think we should follow - in this case the implementation of the matter under discussion.
It’s about what people, who spend our money telling us what to do and how wicked we are, should be spending their time on.
Bringing a relatively small number of deaths down by a projected 10% appears self serving when the same people are appearing to turn a blind eye to the real danger of every single driver, motorcyclist and cyclist having to swerve around potholes in the road. Isn’t that a real danger? How many potholes can you fill with the £millions this will cost?
The French seem to have a way of despising over officious rule makers, whilst still belonging to the rule making EU.
Just had a zombie in a gurt big support utility vehicle, loaded with more warning sensors than one could shake a stick at, run straight into the back of me. I could see by the look on his face he was completely unaware of what he was doing, terribly apologetic I do wonder just how many more drivers will become zombies with the more tech that gets stuffed into the publics motor vehicles. Buzzers and vibraters will soon become distractions to be ignored.
Completely agree.
So many drivers using the tech as a safety net rather than concentrate on driving.
There was a program on TV where they studied the reactions of pilots after being subject to lots of buzzers & stick shakers during training flights.
The pilots acclimatized to the multiple warnings and started to ignore them
I’ve not read all the posts, but will bound to include the usual hysteria.
This tech is already in most cars. As part of all the autonomous safety systems, such as City Brake and crash avoidance. Any car wanting a good NCAP rating has to have all this stuff. The camera reads the speed signs, they are pretty good at it. Pretty much the difference is it defaults to on when you start the car rather than being off. Methods of operation vary from flashing the speed limit in the dash, to small beeps with each speed change. There will be other methods. If you engage intelligent speed limiting it will adjust your speed limiter relative to the posted speed. This may become the default start position that you need to turn off or might not, it will vary between manufacturer. As someone who very much believes in not exceeding 30mph limits and so uses a speed limiter regularly in every single 30 zone, I only think it is a good thing. If you have one, switch it on and just see how quickly someone is up your chuff and how quickly and from how far back to realise just how much limits are not just ignored, but seen as a hindrance.
For anyone that thinks electronic nannying is taking driving enjoyment and safety out of the hands if drivers, just go on any motorway and see the trail of brain dead drivers that sit in the middle lane, or lane 3 if there are 4, one behind the other, who elected to give up their “control” to adaptive cruise control. So, no point getting angry, it is already here and in use.
Keep this on topic, don’t direct comments at individuals and avoid specific political references and we will be fine.
My 2020 BMW X5 was equipped with Intelligent Speed and Cruise Control and I used it for the same reason as Nick - to avoid speeding in my local village where not surprisingly we have schools, old peoples homes and village shops with folk crossing the road at all of them. The technology worked fine while it correctly identified the speed limit - the only problem is it didn’t! After some months letting it set my speed, one day my car suddenly took off from 30mph like a scalded cat - I had at the time no idea what had happened but jammed on the brakes. It repeated the episode a few days later when I noticed the ‘identified’ speed was 110mph! Further locations where the X5 got the speed hugely wrong were found - sometimes 90mph and others 100mph. Local dealer confirmed “nothing wrong” with the car but also, that they had replicated the problem with their MD’s X7! Many letters to BMW UK, then escalated to BMW CEO in Germany resulted at every stage with a total refusal to investigate the phenomena and statement that the driver is always in control (clearly not the case if the car is autonomously accelerating) so responsible for the car’s speed. The Sunday Times sent an investigative journalist and photographers to see and record it happening and wrote a couple of pieces on it - to say they were disbelieving this could happen and shocked when I demonstrated it, (and they recorded it) is an understatement. The articles generated over 400 responses with many other owners and makes reporting the same problem - in one case a VW Golf that suddenly hugely underestimated the speed limit on a motorway and took the car from 70mph to 30mph - an even more dangerous situation I suggest. After much experience with my car, I could identify exactly where it switched to 110mph (and other locations/speeds) and I could place the front wheels 6" to one side or the other of a particular spot in the road to make it happen, or not as the case may be. Before any ‘experts’ tell me it must have been reading an errant sign (the excused used by the BMW dealer) that was absolutely not the case, and there were no other signs to misread. In my experience, this technology as used in BMW’s (and possibly other makers?) is flawed and not fully developed and the manufacturers are woefully and shamefully reluctant to acknowledge that or investigate the issues when reported. Caveat emptor…
my NDRF sometimes misidentifies speed limits, but not always due to stray signs on slip roads etc. Does it use a database (sat nav) as addition to identified images? In which case database errors could be to blame.
I can still manage to overtake some cars on B roads driving a 90 year old car with cable brakes. ( Only if I catch up downhill with the wind behind me on a clear bit of road with speed in hand )
I doubt if I will ever buy a car new enough to have all this stuff on it for me 2005 is a Modern Car
It will be interesting to see how house numbers on wheely bins affect these things.
I believe it uses 3 methods to determine the speed limit: satellite data, the sat nav database and camera recognition (which is prone to misreading the signs on side roads). Actually, as I can’t explain it any other way, I think the errors are related to emc or electronic interference issues, as the mistakes are intermittent and sensitive to the position of the car on the road. The Sunday Times team reported in Feb 2023 on a new £80k BMW iX which incorrectly set the speed limit and accelerated so quickly the driver lost control and crashed, and had to be cut out through the roof - according to Police and Fire Officers she was very lucky to survive. Astonishingly this wasn’t picked up by other news outlets.
Maybe there’s an economy-wide equivalent of the D-notice on unfavourable publicity about e-cars, but inevitably some reports will seep through the cracks.
After all, anything’s fair in the war on climate change.
I think a lot of the electronics in modern cars is very poorly implemented. I have a Skoda which regularly tells me to “take control of the steering” even though I am holding the wheel. The emergency anti collision braking occasionally flashes up. It once slammed the brakes on in a car park for no apparent reason. It regularly tells me it is activating the SOS call system. Of course the dealers say everything is fine.
The story was reported elsewhere. And the poster’s £63,000 BMW was not an electric car.
A little scepticism at the story:
https://www.autoevolution.com/news/driver-claims-bmw-suv-went-for-110-mph-in-30-mph-zone-on-its-own-volition-208012.html
I suppose these expensive BMW SUVs are quick despite their girth, but I suspect even a car like that accelerating from 30 to the indicated 110mph doesn’t offer “minimal time to react”, before the driver notices. Its still just a big heavy thirsty truck. And slamming on the brakes doesn’t throw one back into a seat, but propels you towards that rock hard dashboard.
I know the roads around Great Wakering and Sarfend Seafront; old stamping ground. Which bit of the seafront, from the Kursal to the pier? Or Westcliff end. Or the posh Thorpe Bay part?
And a year before The Times and their so-called exclusive on in-car tech, Top Gear were talking about the same thing in Jaguars
In-car sign recognition is far from foolproof. TopGear.com once ran a long-term Jaguar which insisted the limit down Chiswick High Street – in a very busy area of West London – was a mighty 130mph.
Original paywalled article:
What’s absent from the articles is the statement from the DVSA on the matter as I assume the fault was reported to them.
who needs an electronic device in the car telling you how poor your driving is.
I have a biological carbon unit with blond hair nagging me…
Its a concept that is supposedly being introduced this year. But my electric car is already full of all these safety gizmos, which I dont feel safe in them being there. It fights me steering around potholes to avoided destruction of the vehicle. If I turn it off, it switches itself back on the next journey. My parking at work has a slight slope and when it rains, water slides off the bonnet and hits the brakes hard to say there is an object I am about to hit. It also flashes the speed limit on my screen, so I can’t miss it , when I am ‘speeding’ . When I mean speeding, it flashes 10 mph on the screen as its detecting the road running alongside the 30mph road I am currently driving and on an average day I do this road 4 times. Also, locally, we have a 60mph road with Aldermaston Weapons Establishment next to it and it frantically flashes 10 mph at me there as that’s the limit on their perimeter road. So, people with black boxes , not sure how they get through without markers or penalties at times.
In certain conditions, the road speed limit is that. But Oxfordshire for this county has dropped speed limits everywhere and that’s not due to anything other than lack of road repairs and poor surfaces damaging your vehicle and they being sued, Some of the 20 mph in villages, is just impossible to get up to that kind of speed unless you have a landie or similar.
So are we all going to get free data updates to our sat nav systems every time a local authority changes a speed limit on one of their roads?
The key thing here is to use “speed limiter” not “cruise control”
The story on the gentleman who’s car shot from 30 to 110, true or not, should not happen if speed limiting is being used. And if they were using cruise control, I would tend to agree with the manufacturer, they were not in control of the vehicle.
I believe the original design/plan was for there to be roadside devices that will be read by the car and which would trigger the limiter. Even if you have your limiter on, it can be bypassed by using “kick down” to override. Try it.
Similarly it was going to be available to police to auto trigger the limiter in the event of a high speed chase to bring the car to a safe stop, without override (obviously), similar to tyre deflation stinger but easier to deploy.
My 2020 Fiesta has an intelligent speed limiter (thankfully off by default).
I use it when in unfamiliar areas especially in larger towns with weird speed limits.
However on the open road, I have noticed it showed me a speed limit of 40 mph on a part of the A24 with is definitely 70 mph. So the system is fallible and we will end up crawling along behind cars which are following the limit that the car thinks is correct (even when it is not).
Like all technology it is best used as advisory and not allowed to dominate, since it is far from perfect. I have also seen it pick up the speed limits from side roads (when I was on the main road).