Just glossing over implementation. So every car will have to have wireless communications of some sort? Will there be some government system that all California cars will have to be integrated with that tracks where they are at all times so the car can know the correct speed limit? A tracking system that surely would never be abused or turned into a surveillance device.
“I don’t think it’s at all an overreach, and I don’t think most people would view it as an overreach, we have speed limits, I think most people support speed limits because people know that speed kills,” Wiener said.
Not unless they think about it for five seconds.
Speed doesn’t kill.
It’s the sudden stop that kills you.
Be careful, or politicians are gonna draft a bill preventing your from applying too much braking force too quickly. Thats about in line with the logic on this bill.
Next up, skin cancer:
Suns don’t kill people. People with suns kill people.
Funny enough, they already did long ago. It’s call ABS. :)
Doesn’t abs make you stop sooner than both slamming on locking braks or manually pumping them? Idk sounds like more of a sudden stop to me, congress gonna ban ABS next
ABS also shortens your stopping distance. At least good ABS does, originally it sucked.
ABS is designed to prevent the wheels from locking up and skidding. This reduces the total braking force applied a bit, because it’s quickly pulsing the brakes, but is safer because you still have a bit of steering control.
ABS does the same thing as pumping your brakes, just faster. And you don’t need to and probably shouldn’t pump the brakes on a car with ABS.
Skidding also reduces braking force though, just from a perspective of car vs road, not break pad vs rotor. Unless im mistaken, and aside from control, anti lock breaks bring the car to a stop quicker, presuming traction break.
You are correct. Anti-lock brakes emulate cadence braking, and are more effective than threshold braking, and far more effective than locking your brakes
…or the sudden start.
Lol correct. Speed doesn’t kill, acceleration does
Belter slingshot racers know this all too well. NOTE: Spoiler for an episode in the Expanse which everyone should watch if they haven’t already.
One way I could think to implement it without any tracking or data connection connection with no data being transmitted from the vehicle would be by placing infrared strobe lights periodically along the road, possibly at the same places we already have speed limit signs. The flashing is invisible to the human eye but could be picked up by cameras on the vehicle, vary the speed or pattern of the strobe to indicate a different speed limit.
Something pretty similar is already used by a lot of emergency vehicles to trigger green lights, just the arrangement is reversed with a strobe on the vehicle and a sensor on the traffic signal.
Of course such a system would potentially be vulnerable to things like power outages (strobe can’t strobe if it doesn’t have power) bad weather (heavy fog, or if the camera and/orr strobe are covered in snow,) and someone could potentially circumvent it by just mounting a strobe light on their car pointed at the camera.
You could probably address the snow/fog issue by locking the car to a lower speed if no strobe is detected, maybe 25 or 35mph, because in those conditions people should generally be driving slower anyway, and then you don’t have the expense of needing to put strobes around lower speed areas. And the power issue could be addressed with the kind of solar panels and/or backup batteries that already power some streetlights and such.
And for those who tamper with the system to circumvent it, we’re never going to stop speeders entirely, but we can increase the fines to make up for lost revenue to keep police departments happy, they make less traffic stops and rake in the same amount of money.
The infrastructure limitation could be resolved by using infrared reflectors along the road instead of lights. Have the car shine infrared light at the reflectors so it’s cameras can read the code on them (like an infrared QR code, maybe?)
Blockage by other vehicles, weather wear, angle from the current lane, it’s fraught with problems.
Nah don’t worry, they’ll use 2.4Ghz spectrum and drown out WiFi near a road.
I haven’t read the article, so just spitballing here: I have to assume the approach here is to electronically govern the engine to go no faster than the highest speed limit. I don’t know what the limits are in California, but where I live that’d mean the car would be limited to 80mph. If it was electronic, it could be adjusted if then limits were changed.
Otherwise, it’d be insane, and require the crazy infrastructure you describe. And they simply don’t have the money or the wherewithal to build an actual coverage that would allow the limiter to dynamically scale all the time.
Alternatively, I suppose you could imagine a hybrid system—ie an overall limited engine to the max limit, and then some sort of transponder that would throttle the limit down if you were near an important speed limit zone, like a school, which they could manage to deploy a transmitter at… still seems technologically challenging for the state to really pull off consistently though.
Either way, yeah not a fan or including more required tracking tech in vehicles. I don’t think I’d really hate a reasonably limited car—I really can’t justify needing to drive over 80 ever really, even in an emergency, but it would drive me insane to have the car just magically throttling down whenever it thought it was time to. See
I read the article, it definitely doesn’t bother to think about how something like this would be implemented, but certainly seems to be referring to a dynamic Limiting system… good luck.
One of our cars uses GPS and a lookup to show the current speed limit on the dash. It’s often wrong. This will not go well.
You realize your car already knows what speed it’s driving without GPS, right?
I don’t think you’re following the implication.
What, that up to date speed databases are an impossible problem to solve? Or that you couldn’t possibly get current speed limits from a non-GPS method? These aren’t hard problems.
If it’s not a hard problem, it wouldn’t happen.
You’d be amazed how many problems can be solved when the people involved have legal liability. My first GPS unit was out of date from the moment I bought it. It wasn’t because keeping a map up to date was hard, it was because they didn’t care, you’d already bought the GPS and it was better than not having one at all. This isn’t a technological problem.
Your car’s GPS-localized speed map is wrong because no one cares enough to make it right, not because it’s an unsolvable problem. It’s a gimmick to get you to buy the car, and you already bought the car.
Apple and Google also have problems with speed limits being updated, and they actively attempt to keep their maps updated. Even Waze has incorrect data sometimes, and that can be corrected by anyone. So I don’t think it’s quite as simple as you think it is.
Sure, the car knows its forward speed from its speedometer.
It doesn’t know the speed limit of the road it’s currently riding on, that’s not as easy to directly measure. Currently the most straightforward way to do this is have it look up its location using GPS, use that data to look up what road the car is driving on, and then look up the speed limit for that section of road. This is far from error prone; GPS isn’t perfect and could, for example, confuse your current position for another road nearby; it might think you’re on a slip road next to the interstate you’re driving on, or think you’re on rather than under an overpass, that sort of thing. The database might be out of date or in error, the data connection to that database might be unreliable…
The California legislative process: First, say something totally reasonable. “People should be able to tell if the products they buy contain poisonous or carcinogenic chemicals, let’s require consumer goods that contain hazardous chemicals to bear a label describing them as such.” Next, do absolutely no research, consult no technicians or engineers, only lawyers and yoga instructors get a say. Once you’ve got all the spelling errors ironed out, have it carved into adamantium so that it’s more permanent than god. Finally, strictly enforce the letter of the law in any way it could be interpreted. Which is why literally every single product that might get sold in California up to and including bottles of mineral water all say THIS PRODUCT CONTAINS CHEMICALS KNOWN IN THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA TO CAUSE CANCER on the label, and since literally every manufactured good is labeled as hazardous, consumers have exactly no more information than they used to.
I’m a software engineer with colleagues who work with various localization and short range communication. This is totally technologically feasible. All the “what if it’s not sure” cases just default to the higher limit. It won’t be sufficient for self-driving cars to know how fast to drive, but it will prevent the vast majority of excessive speeding.
The what-ifs are just people either flailing around to not have their speeding curtailed or people who assume half-assed apps from companies that don’t have any reason to care if they’re right are the state of the art. They always come up with absurd reasons why they need to speed or why implementation is impossible whenever any road safety improvement is proposed. It’s a boring and pathological response.
There is already a good amount of wireless in most cars. We’ve had standards since the Bush administration for cars to wirelessly communicate with each other.
I personally can’t wait to start hacking cars going by on the freeway to make their top speed a negative value.
That’s going to be so much fun.
Similar things have already been done.
https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/
Oh yeah, I know.
or the car use gps, gps is not able to track you(at least not it alane), and you still know where you are
Every car I’ve hired in the last ten years has the current speed limit displayed on the dashboard. It does not require the car to communicate any information, only to receive it.
That is a different question from how car manufacturers could abuse the requirement to get more data to sell, of course. But there’s nothing in this bill that would require the car to collect any data that isn’t already publicly displayed by the roadside.
Not Internet, that’s too expensive.
Mechanical governors for ICE vehicles have been around for over 120 years. It wouldn’t be hard to make an electronic version for e-vehicles.
Those are fixed speed governors for fleet fuel economy and/or manufacturer choice to prevent operators from turning their engine block into something externally ventilated. Not variable governors that require knowledge of where the car is to adapt to the local speed limit, a significantly more complex challenge, and one with a solution that is inherently insecure, privacy-violating, and almost guaranteed to instantly be abused.
Do you think GPS units are broadcasting their location to know where they are? They just download maps and use the signal to localize themselves. Too many people acting like they know how tech works without understanding the basics of the largely non-networked world that existed before smartphones and spyware apps absorbed every feature.
Yes, but speed limits change. There’s no way of reliably knowing what the current speed limit is without wireless communication.
As someone with an Audi that will adjust your cruise control automatically based on speed limit (or rather what it thinks the speed limit is) I couldn’t be more against this. I had to disable the feature after multiple times where it thought I was on some 15mph ramp rather than the freeway and slammed on the brakes in the middle of traffic going 70mph.
VW and BYD as well, but VW has been the most accurate I have driven. Even with that I would say at best 80% accurate on what the speed limit is.
Almost every new vehicle is already sending info to the manufacturers now.
Did you think about this for even 5 seconds?
What about in an emergency? What is someone needs to go over that limit for evasive maneuvers or something?
I get it, people speed, but put the cameras up and just fine them. That’s all.
What about in an emergency? What is someone needs to go over that limit for evasive maneuvers or something?
(Technologically speaking) Do it. Since we’re talking communication and electronics, you’ll be automatically reported. Present your excuse and let’s see what happens.
(I’m not saying that I’m in favour of this.)
Oh, and I’ve driven a car with speed limiter. It’s like cruise control, but it doesn’t let you go above the speed you choose. It was an amazing experience, I loved it. You press the accelerator, you get to that speed and it stays there. You feel a resistance on the pedal. If you want, simply force the pedal a bit more. It will turn the controller off and let you drive faster.
It says it allows the driver to temporarily override the speed restriction.
Then people will be doing that all the time.
I actually quite dislike cars but this is fucking insane
Authoritarian nonsense.
Yes, enforcing “laws” is authoritarian.
Ah. No thanks. New cars already bend us over a barrel for our data. I don’t need you monitoring me 24/7 on my speed and location. I like the side guards on semis idea though. Run with that one, Wiener.
Isn’t this already happening though?
Some have them. Wouldn’t mind seeing them on all trailers.
Nothing about the proposal requires any tracking.
Can’t go 10 over the speed limit, right?
How the hell will they know the speed limit where I am at?
Pre-download speed maps or passively receive speed broadcasts from the roadside.
Good God, use your imagination just a tiny little bit!
Ok. I’m using it.
My car has the hover ability from Back to the Future 2, and they are still going to track me. What now?
How about your car has maps stored on it that contain stored limit information?
Not everything is about tracking you.
I am not a “muh freedom” guy, I don’t drive more than 10 over anyway. But this is just logistically a bad way to stop speeding.
Where does my car get the current speed limit information? How and when does it update as speed limits change? Will school systems around the country have to submit a list of which days are “school days” for school zone speed limits?
What if the GPS registers you on the 30mph road below or next to the 70mph highway, long term or even for a momentary glitch? Who is at fault if that causes you to be in an accident?
This tech should be developed and used to stop chase vehicles. Also if it is used to stop people from going 10 over then we shouldn’t have cops checking people’s speed anymore.
Come to Omaha, where they already don’t.
Well, city cops don’t. State patrol ain’t got shit to do and will absolutely fuck up your day. But they don’t leave I80.
10mph over? Have they driven on CA freeways? The vast majority of traffic is moving at 15+ mph over.
This will cause traffic slow downs and more road rage.
One interesting about speeding in traffic. Often you’re rushing just to stop.
It’s been proven that if you cap the max speed in heavy traffic everyone gets through it faster. Less stop and go with merges and guesses.
Think of all the times someone sped up to prevent you from changing lanes? Or someone blocks you during a zipper merge.
Traffic wouldn’t suck as much if people didn’t suck. I can’t wait until a few decades from now we’ve got AI cars Managing it for us.
Variable speed limits just keep the road ticking over and they’re great. In the UK there were a bunch of highway improvements being rolled out, like reversible lanes, traffic flow monitoring and, yes, full-time variable speed limits and they all worked really, really well. But they also got rid of the hard shoulder (refuge lane) and the whole thing was collectively referred to as “smart motorways”. Needless to say that lots of people were injured or killed by the lack of hard shoulders, so now the government is poised to announce a rollback of all the smart motorway measures, including the absolutely superb variable speed limits.
Ah yes, the all-or-nothing approach, typical anglosphere reaction to a problem.
Canada does this shit too, it is infuriating.
I’m citing the Smart motorways in my response but I forgot my source.
I also didn’t know about the shoulders. Thank you
This will cause traffic slow downs
That’s literally the point.
Especially since they won’t be able to make older cars follow this.
Sounds like a roundabout way to track everyone
You don’t have to track a car to limit how fast it goes. Speed governerors exist inside gas powered cars already. All that has to be done is 1) legally require a manufacturer to limit speeds of their vehicles, and 2) prosecute them when they do not implement those restrictions. The rest is lawyers and lines of code (and lines of coke I guess)
You need location data to be able to determine what limit to impose.
And I bet you anything it will be a cloud based system.
You don’t, just just need localized broadcast and a receiver in the car. Or cameras and signs as other people have mentioned.
How do you think GPS receivers work?
They don’t transmit the speed limit of the current road, and for things like construction they’ll need real-time updates.
I’m certain they won’t want to push the entire database out to every vehicle for every update…
I have a hard time believing it would be impossible to wire up a device that sends out a wireless signal with the local speed limit at every speed limit sign.
Why does it need to go to a database for it instead of have a receiver on the vehicle itself to pull data as it passes speed limit signs?
In fact, a centralized database would likely have more problems with not being accurate or current. Have you ever dealt with government databases?
Edit: Part of the reason the database would be trash is because speed limits are set by cities, not by the state. So in the database scenario every time a city updates their speed limit, they have to document all the zones and upload them to the database. All it takes is paperwork getting backed up a week for that to cause problems.
The problem with proposing infrastructure is that people hate it. Even if it would be beneficial. Train traffic is limited to 79 mph in the US because the companies in charge were told “put in more safety devices or you’re limited to 79 mph”, and they said “okay sure”.
They usually act like anything that wasn’t around when they were born is impossible. I can’t imagine trying to get a smoking ban passed now, or capping the national speed limit at 55 because of an oil crisis.
i’d sabotage those signs’ transmitters so fast
We got a tough guy here.
EDIT: Also I’m fairly sure that destruction of government property is a felony and if it’s wired for this, it could easily be wired to take and send photos when tampered with, but you do you. I guess people do just hate infrastructure more than *checks notes… being spied on. Because when given an alternative without a database, they shit on it.
Generally temporary speed limit changes just go down, so the worst case is for a little while your car will let you speed. And if it goes up but the town fucks up and doesn’t update the database, people will complain while being forced to drive a little slower than the new maximum.
They don’t need real time updates to accomplish their goals. The car just needs accurate days most of the time. Having the car download periodic updates to a database that covers the whole state is perfectly feasible and involves no tracking.
You should be worried more about tracking through license plates and cameras.
It would work everywhere except construction sites, where we can just have cops like we do everywhere right now.
GPS is a great solution, it already tells you what the speed limits are depending on the software.
In the cloud…
That would only be true if there was only one speed limit everywhere. Which there isn’t.
A car can tell it’s own speed, can know where it is, and can read speed limit signs. It’s not rocket science.
I drove a rental car 10 years ago in the Netherlands that would beep when the GPS said I went over the speed limit.
This system can easily be implemented without needing a government spying program. You just need legislation, and enforcement.
How do you determine the location of the car and the speed limit on that section of road? Sounds awfully close to tracking it.
Cars can already read speed limit signs without any form of tracking. What’s funny is it will read unofficial speed limit signs on private driveways. It’s anecdotal but a 2021 Camry I drove recognized a 10 mph sign that looked very similar to a DoT sign and displayed it on the dash.
Working in the industry on these technologies, this is a horrible idea. I’ve driven vehicles that already have it, and it’s nice when it’s optional, but would legitimately be a hazard if it was on all the time.
What happens when it’s dark and/or rainy, and it reads the 45MPH sign on the side road you were on, but misses the 70MPH sign when you’re actually on the highway? It limits your ability to actually accelerate to the flow of traffic as well, since it generally won’t change the speed until after you pass it. Or even better, you’re doing 70 and it catches a 35MPH on a side road adjacent to the highway? What happens if you just cover the camera and it can’t read anything? Does the car just go into limp mode and limit you to 25MPH?
This isn’t a hypothetical, I see it happen very, very regularly in even the best systems available. They also probably won’t work for the lighted school zone speed limit signs by me, or the express lane type signs.
Map based also eliminates school and construction zones, which is where you want this most,
As it stands today, covering or disconnecting the camera results in the car throwing a warning. The system will either partially disable only the directly related features, or will disable entirely. With the Camry I drove, you lose lane keep assist, sign detection, collision avoidance and automatic cruise control. All of the driver assistance features rely on the front camera. Some cars use a combination of radar and camera so not everything is lost.
That’s a perfectly valid reason for it cars to not do it today.
That’s not a valid reason for saying we shouldn’t legislate it as a requirement. “If a car can’t prevent itself from going 10mph over the speed limit on our roads, it’s not allowed to drive on our roads”. Done.
Nothing is fool proof. There will be failures, and that’s okay. We can handle them the exact same way we handle them today: speeding tickets.
Thanks. Now I could easily see the havoc one troll with a sign can do with over-regulating like this.
Yeah I’ve seen that technology. But it definitely isn’t widespread.
Oh it is. Pretty much every automaker selling a mid and high level trim for any model has the feature. If it has the driver assistance features included, it can read signs. Base models are less likely to have it, but it’s not unheard of. A 2018 and later base model, 2wd, 2d Tacoma comes with lane keep assist, collision avoidance, automatic cruise control, and sign reading. It’s a $22k truck.
Tracking is the action of a 3rd party.
The car itself has GPS, knows it’s own speed, and can read speed limit signs. This can easily be done without the government needing to know the exact speed, position, and velocity of every vehicle on every section of road.
Since a lot of discussion is happening around how they’re going to implement this, and the article doesn’t go into the details, here’s more information: https://sd11.senate.ca.gov/news/20240124-senator-wiener-introduces-groundbreaking-bills-slash-california-road-deaths-epidemic
In line with NTSB recommendations, SB 961 requires every passenger vehicle, truck, and bus manufactured or sold in the state to be equipped with speed governors that limits the vehicle’s speed based on the speed limit for the roadway segment. The maximum speed threshold over the speed limit for that segment that the speed governor may permit the vehicle to travel at is 10 miles per hour over the speed limit. SB 961 also permits the vehicle operator to temporarily override the speed governor function. SB 961’s speed governor requirement does not apply to emergency vehicles.
And if anyone really wants to dive into it, the actual text for the bill is here: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240SB961
Lots of people arguing about the practicality of this, or whether it can be done without invading privacy or slippery-sloping into mass surveillance.
The thing is: Even if it could be done perfectly — giving instant leeway when emergencies occur, being perfectly private forever, with perfectly accurate sensors — I still don’t think we’d want it.
That’s because laws are not just mechanical things. They are social things. When we put up a speed limit sign, it’s not just to configure a number in the driver’s mind. It’s to remind them to think about how they’re interacting with the community around them.
De-emphasizing that responsibility runs counter to this social purpose, which I think we intuitively understand at some level even if we reflexively bring out other claims in order to object to the policy.
I’m currently in a rental that reads street signs and keeps the limit on the dash. Very handy for double-checking when you’re suddenly not going the same speed as traffic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic-sign_recognition
Had a Budget truck like this.
Going 70 down the Interstate when it saw a 15mph sign for a weigh station. Scared the piss out of me, and almost caused a huge pile up.
Fuck that shit.
In my experience with them by Dodge is the speed is wrong often enough where it can be a problem.
Saying 25mph when it is 45mph is one thing, but the 45mph when it is 25mph is another. There are a few rural roads where it said 30mph when it was 55mph. I would see the speed on the dash and think it was an odd speed for the road and Waze said something other than the car, so I would be in this total state of not knowing to trust the car, myself, or Waze. Eventually I just started to ignore the car and use my experience and observations weighted against Waze.
If it were a perfect system, that’d be cool.
Hopefully they improve it, sounds useful.
This is just a failure of road design. Roads should be designed so you don’t even need to see a sign to tell you how fast to go.
How would you do that?
Spend lots of money.
Isn’t that just going to cause accidents? For all the non regulated cars on the highway, what happens if you need to merge into a lane where the flow of traffic is faster than the speed limit? It doesn’t even have to be a highway, but lane changes in any city can have that problem I imagine.
I can only imagine going to pass and failing to do so in as timeless manner as needs to occur…
That would make passing so much more dangerous as people are in the other lane even longer.
What about if it was some type of close range radio signal or passive transmitter that communicates to your car when speed limits change?
Then again, when I was in Germany the car I rented had the posted speed limit displayed on the digital gauges. Maybe a GPS system that brings up the speed data for the road you’re on.
OR, what about a visual camera system that limits the car to the posted signage?
The cameras on my Kia read limit signs and displays the sign on the dash. I can set my adaptive cruise to change speed based on the posted signs. I have to make a 8 hour drive six times a year and that adaptive speed changing is bliss. I can even set it to posted speed +5 mph. The display will even show a yellow school zone bar on the bottom of the speed limit sign on the dash. It’s surprisingly fancy. It even picks up charges based on construction so I know it’s using the cameras and not gps.
My 7 year old Renault audibly complains if I exceed the posted speed limit.
It doesnt know about daily school schedules or roadworks speeds, nor does it physically slow my car down, but its still useful. Ive never had a speeding ticket in it. And I can turn the alert off if I want.
Seven isn’t that old, what have you done to it?
Camera systems that read signage are nice, but not reliable enough. From my experience, it reads the signs on the side roads as well. And I don’t want my car slowing down to 50 km/h on the motorway because of a petrol station.
Has Scott Wiener ever driven on a freeway with clear traffic?
