I’m old enough to remember cars (legally) with one rear light, no reflectors, no brake light and no indicators, some had those little orange “trafficators”, fingers that popped out from the pillar behind the front doors when you manually flicked a switch or you used hand signals. Well that certainly dates me!
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I’m sure there will be some software to turn it off completely, people always find a way to hack in to these things.
I’m more of a biker at heart and there is no I.S.A for bikes, ironic as their power to weight ratio is quite extreme and won’t cost you the earth to have a machine that will do 180+ and 0-60 under 4s if its on 2 wheels.
What’s the point in buying anything other than a boring hatchback with 100hp if you you’re locked to the speed limit. Surely all the sports cars will just die off at this rate.
I agree, that could be a concern but based on @Binty’s comments if used correctly it could be invaluable.
I don’t like the big brother (always watching) idea but the black box (stores information in the lead up to an incident) concept is logical.
Planes have had them for years and when you look at any motor sport they have systems for collecting that sort of data too.
I think someone might come along and look to see if there is a way of extracting the data so you can analyse it as you would if you had a data logger in a track car.
For privacy etc. I doubt there will be two way communication, the car will know the current speed limit and inform you if you exceed it (all the while logging what you are doing) but this won’t get transmitted anywhere, purely logged on the car.
That’s right it is encoded in the car not transmitted and will require some sophisticated software to extract it.
One of the big issues - to me at least - is how the limits are set in the first place, how appropriate they are and the reasons behind them.
I wrote about this back in 2019: “Simple, neat and wrong.” | MMC Musings
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Well, we got used to mobile phones, cctv, online everything, so we can’t really be worried about big brother watching.
NDs seem to already know what the speed limit is, even when not actively using the satnav, it can be set to warn when approaching a speed camera.
Mine regularly reports “speed camera ahead”, but once recently it said “speed camera ahead, please watch your speed”, and I saw I was around 3mph above the current limit and was able to slow down in time. Wonder if it records all this somewhere?
It does and that information can be accessed by “Public Authorities” in the event of accidents, law-breaking etc… There is a section covering this in my handbook - 8-2 onwards.
I hope the information is more up to date than that on my regularly updated Sat Nav. There is a 30mph estate road I regularly use built about 20 years ago and still not shown as having any limit at all. There are also several roads that have had the speed limit reduced and still 5 years later showing the previous higher limit.
That is one of the concerns as there is a delay with the data. The system is not specified, map data and camera sign recognition are the current methods plus C-ITS is standard now on some cars like the Golf 8 (branded Car2X), but there is not yet the infrastructure to ‘talk’ to the vehicles, but they do ‘talk’ to each other.
It is for that reason the systems can be turned off if they error. The original type approval proposal did not have the ability to turn them off but it was amended in the consultation phase.
I remembered seeing a video about all this some time ago which showed the problems with their cars system:
All new cars will have speed limiters from 2022. Good or bad idea? - YouTube
I read somewhere that it will be switchable like stop/start with a button and you can just turn it off before you start your journey. More needless hand holding and prone to errors.
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