Speed Limiters for cars
December 31st, 2008 at 12:34 pm by David FarrarStuff reports from Reuters:
Cars should be fitted with devices to regulate their speed to cut fatal accidents by a quarter, a UK government advisory body said.
The UK Commission for Integrated Transport and the Motorists’ Forum said the voluntary use of so-called intelligent speed adaption would cut 40,000 road deaths over a 60-year period.
The proposed system would automatically slow the engine and apply the brakes to keep a car within local speed limits, although the driver would be able to override the limiter.
It said the limiters would also reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 6 per cent on roads where cars go at speeds of up to 70 miles per hour.
The commission called on the UK’s Department of Transport to start building a database of road speed limit maps which would be needed to operate the system.
Are these people stupid? Every GPS vehicle device in the UK already has a database of speed limit maps. MY GPS has it for UK, France and NZ. So if they are ignorant of this fact, how much can we trust them on anything else?
Also note the 40,000 road deaths are over 60 years, so that is 667 a year out of a population of 60 million or around 1 in 100,000.
Personally I think the future will have GPS fitted in almost every car, and a cruise control option so that it can cruise at the maximum speed. The anti-collision technology is some way off, but we already have parts of it with the beeping as you reverse if you are about to hit something.
December 31st, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Another waste of taxpayer money by the UK government. It’s a damn shame we have to wait until 2010 to vote Gordon and the useless Labour party out. How little will the pound be worth by then?
Vote:December 31st, 2008 at 7:34 pm
Labour are obsessed with controlling people’s lives!
Brown doesn’t even have a driving liscence!
One eyed freak. With the charm and Charisma of his (on the cusp of evil) sister. Helun. The proud to be a baritone weirdo.
Vote:December 31st, 2008 at 11:23 pm
“Also note the 40,000 road deaths are over 60 years, so that is 667 a year out of a population of 60 million or around 1 in 100,000.”
And how many people are affected by each of those deaths? Actually when I read of guestimated (long term) projections like that in the media, I tend to ignore them as they are always skewed to favour the intent of the promoter of the concept. However in fairness, when DPF breaks it down to read 1 in 100,000 p.a. I think this is quite conservative actually considering speed is so often a major contibuting factor in road deaths.
Overall I think this concept has merit, and the reaction above is akin to the people who scoffed at making seatbelts compulsory 35+ years ago. We already have a basic form of speed limiting in many heavy trade vehicles in NZ so I think the safety benefits are obvious if this can be extended to cars in all or most zones (after some technological advancements obviously).
Vote:January 1st, 2009 at 10:24 am
I’ve been asking why our vehicles aren’t at least limited to 100Kph for years and I think the answer is very clear.
We certainly have the technology to limit all vehicles to a maximum speed of 100Kph — most modern cars (especially European ones) are already speed limited as a function of the engine-management computer.
Isn’t it somewhat hypocritical to allow the sale of vehicles that will do twice or even more the open road speed limit — when at the same time, we don’t allow the sale of machine-guns (because they might be mis-used to kill people) and we ban the sale of many other things that *might* be mis-used so as to break the law?
The thing is that every day, people in NZ mis-use their fast cars to kill themselves and others (remember all that “speed kills” propaganda that we see on TV) yet there’s no restrictions at all on a vehicle’s top speed. A 16-year-old can jump into the drivers seat of a hot Nissan Skyline and easily do twice the open-road speed limit (or more).
And before peopkle jump up and down and say “but limiting the maximum speed to 100Kph would be dangerous, sometimes you need to travel faster than that to do things like pass safely” — I urge you to tell that to the police.
In law, there is absolutely *no* justification for exceeding 100Kph on the open road — not even if it is simply to make your passing maneuvers safer. In fact, it’s not at all uncommon to find speed cameras placed at the end of passing lanes on SH1 where they regularly ping drivers for doing as little as 10kph over the speed limit while passing slower traffic.
The real reason we don’t have our vehicles limited to 100Kph is because it’s a move that would affect not just “the common folks” but also those who make the rules.
MPs and bureaucrats enjoy a quick blat on the open road as much as anyone — so they don’t want that freedom removed.
And… it’s also a *great* revenue generator for the crown’s coffers. For a small investment in speed cameras, lasers and radars, they rake in millions of dollars a year.
And the biggest reason might be that if we were limited to 100kph, it could just turn out that speed in of itself would be proven *not* to be the huge factor that is so often claimed.
For these reasons we’ll *never* see cars in NZ limited or governed — until such time as alternative ways of replacing the revenue and granting MPs/bureaucrats immunity from such measures.
[DPF: If you can't even exceed the speed limit to pass a car, then the de facto speed limit will become 80 km/hr or so. IIRC a car at 100 km/hr will need 2 kilometres of clear road to overtake a car at 90 km/hr]
Vote:January 2nd, 2009 at 1:30 pm
“The anti-collision technology is some way off,”
There is technology out there and it is on its way to NZ – albeit in higher end cars.
Vote:Technology such as sensors that trigger an alarm when you inadvertently cross the middle line (without indicating, such as when you fall asleep at the wheel).