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
Limit it to repeat offenders, like the car breathalyzers for drunk drivers.
Good.
Why would you need a car that can go 200mph? Where are you going to use it? Oh yeah typically in school zones or some shit. If the limit is 50mph, ITS FOR A FUCKING REASON.
Also, US cites and states, START DESIGNING YOUR ROADS FOR THE SPEED YOU NEED. If you design a road next to a school like a highway, don’t be surprised when people drive 70mph. This simple idea is used all over the place in the Netherlands and guess what? IT FUCKING WORKS BECAUSE IT MAKES FUCKING SENSE .
/rant
“Land of the free” california does not deserve to be part of thw US
I’m not saying I support the measure but I also don’t understand your statement? We curtail some freedoms to create some safety for the public. Limiting driving speed is one of them and has a massive impact on traffic fatalities in busy areas. There are other people on the road.
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?
Will school systems around the country have to submit a list of which days are “school days” for school zone speed limits?
Story time!
There is an elementary school a few towns over from me which happens to straddle the only viable throughfare in that area. Note that this is out in the country, so it’s not like it’s on Main Street or anything. There is no other road. Well, it’s got one of those blinker signs that says “15 MPH speed limit when flashing.” It’s meant to be used during pick-up and drop-off times, for obvious reasons.
A few years ago some cantankerous asshole at the school with no real authority decided that people were “zOoMiNg ToO FaSt!!!” on “their” road and during summer vacation flipped the sign on and left it blinking all day and night. Then a bunch of “anonymous” calls starting coming in to the local PD about people exceeding the 15 MPH speed limit. They had to get somebody with keys to come out and turn the fucking sign off. And the next morning, lo and behold the sign was once again mysteriously turned on. This process repeated for several weeks until the culprit was finally caught, who unsurprisingly was some low-grade administrator for the local school district. Insofar as I am aware no actual punishment was meted out.
Tl;dr: If you give petty egos even a tiny amount of perceived control over people’s lives they absolutely will abuse it to the fullest extent they are physically or technically able to, without fail. It’s not a matter of if, it’s only a matter of when.
How about also 50 km/h hard limit in city?
I heard that some countries have zero leeway for speed limit trespassing, like if it says 100 and you go 101 that’s a fine time. I don’t understand why that’s not the case in other places, why not increase the limit by that 10 mph/kmph you allow now and stop allowing speeding at all
The issue with this is because it doesn’t work for the actual purpose of speed limits in the US. If the goal was to set the limit at the maximum speed that is safe for that road and then not exceed it then zero tolerance would work. In the real world though speed limits aren’t about safety at all, they are purely revenue generation for police departments. They are 100% set with the intent of having people break them so that the local government can make money. People obeying a speed limit 100% of the time would literally break every single local government in the US, the current system literally can’t exist if people don’t speed.
In California, local government does not get any revenue from speeding tickets. It is one reason there is so little enforcement of traffic laws.
People will always push the limits. That leeway is there for specific situations where you’d need to speed up to avoid something or even for those who are slightly speeding without realising
The second part seems like it could be fixed by people not trying to drive as fast as they can, imo
The first one, well, now in those specific situations they just need to speed up even more because everyone is already driving limit + whatever is allowed ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Because car speedometers are not calibrated by law, and can be off a few percent. Changes in temperature can change tire radius as well.
After all that you then get into court proceeding of proving speed gun calibration has to be perfect.
And again, you don’t need to go exactly at the [increased] limit, you can go below it and allow for speedometer being not exactly correct
I don’t understand why that’s not the case in other places
the auto industry lobby.
Why not just make people follow the speed limit? Why let them go 10mph over in the first place?
To allow for vehicles to pass one another before the end of this century.
If they’re going fast enough that the speed limit isn’t fast enough to pass them, maybe you don’t need to pass them.
If I’m stuck behind a tractor on the road, they’re probably going 15 mph and I can easily pass them by just going the speed limit. If you’re stuck behind someone going 50 in a 55, tough luck. It’s not like you’re losing that much time anyway.
You save like 3 minutes over 30 miles. It’s nothing. People just think it’s so much faster because they don’t do the math.
Not being able to pass a slow car just angers people.
People who are angry about the slow car are probably going to ride their ass.
People riding other people’s ass don’t have enough following distance to react to an emergency brake.
Now there’s an accident and traffic comes to a half.
People coming up from behind are in the same scenario.
Now there’s a pileup.
Congrats! You’ve now made the roads less safe.
Speeding also makes the road less safe. No matter what speed you’re moving at, the issue you describe will exist. So I don’t agree that slowing traffic makes things more dangerous. In fact there is a huge amount of data that proves the opposite.
This is just mental gymnastics to justify what people want to believe—that they have a right to drive as fast as they want no matter what. Sorry, it isn’t true.
And pileups never happen when people speed 🙄
You know what? You’re right.
Let’s ban private car ownership.
Let’s ban private car ownership.
Or even better, just create viable public transportation, and discourage the plague of suburbia. Let the people who want to drive drive. And the people who only see it as a means to get from point A to B out of cars.
Except those people who want to drive have a huge burden on society for basically no reason. Fuck em. Nobody gets to drive.
You sound like someone who has never themselves driven in real traffic before.
🙄 That leapfrog shit where you zip in and out of crawling traffic every time there’s a gap is dangerous and people shouldn’t do it in the first place. If traffic is super slow then the speed limit is easily fast enough to pass anyway.
Also, it shouldn’t be your job to speed to make up for bad traffic. That’s a failure of public policy and engineering. We should fix that.
There are a number of scenarios where one might do 10+ over the speed limit to get around someone on the highway that does not involve the leap-frogging-in-crawling-traffic maneuver you’re referring to.
Yeah, you might want to get around them, but only to save a couple of minutes. If someone is going slow enough for me to give a shit, the speed limit is enough to pass. Otherwise, tough luck, you have to go 50 in a 55
no
You mean like the jackholes who think the best way out of a traffic jam is to drive on the shoulder so they can pass everybody? 🙄
“Real traffic” is nearly a dead-stop and you’re not in a position to gun it to get ahead in most cases.
Source: The real traffic of Seattle.
I lived in Seattle for 7 years and am well aware of what I5 traffic through Tacoma is like during rush hour. I used to drive to visit friends down in Portland on Friday after work pretty frequently.
deleted by creator
If everyone is driving 10mph above the speed limit, we’re back to square one.
Has Scott Wiener ever driven on a freeway with clear traffic?
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.
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.
Did you think about this for even 5 seconds?
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.
Almost every new vehicle is already sending info to the manufacturers now.
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.
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.
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.
Will there be some government system that all California cars will have to be integrated with that tracks where they are at all times
We have that already. They are digital license plates. It’s voluntary right now fortunately.
Folks… it’s available as a subscriptionnn!!!
I really don’t understand why this is a product at all. What value does it provide me for $250/yr?
Saves a few seconds of applying registration stickers every year?
Anti-theft…
Kinda makes sense for fleet vehicles I think, where you’re already installing trackers anyway.
Privacy nightmare for personal vehicles!
I’ll buy the argument on a fleet vehicle. But I miss any reasonable use case that justifies the price for Joe Blow the consumer.
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.
If we’re going to use technically limitations on the vehicle side, we can simply continue to use optical recognition of speed signs instead of changing putting an IR transmitter on every speed sign. It’s gotten really good in recent years.
Apart from roads that don’t have speed signs…
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.
So Uber already does this. Yes, you need to have GPS enabled, but Uber can tell when you’re speeding. Same with insurance companies and their apps. The technology to determine what street you’re on, what the limit is, and how fast you’re going already exists.
Both of those examples are irrelevant to some of us like myself who participates in neither of those. Those are not good excuses to limit anyone’s freedom through legislation.
or the car use gps, gps is not able to track you(at least not it alane), and you still know where you are
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.
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 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.
ABS/pumping the brakes is implemented because sliding friction is less that static friction. It’s why you can nudge something on a slope to start sliding and it doesn’t stop but would have happily sat there before hand.
Your car wheels experience static friction because while in motion the patch in contact with the road isn’t moving. Or at least they do until you skid.
So ABS brakes/releases to get a new round of static friction.
Pumping the brakes is probably a phrase that came from before power assisted brakes (when you were manually pressurizing the hydraulics) but still had relevance because it was also ABS.
You are correct. Anti-lock brakes emulate cadence braking, and are more effective than threshold braking, and far more effective than locking your brakes
ABS also shortens your stopping distance. At least good ABS does, originally it sucked.
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.
…or the sudden start.
Lol correct. Speed doesn’t kill, acceleration does
Not Internet, that’s too expensive.
What exactly happens when you drive…
A - out of state? B - from one posted speed limit to another? C - If you disable or remove the device from the vehicle?
Technologically speaking, easy.
A - system turns off
B - new speed becomes the current limit
C - reported/ticket/vehicle is disabled.
I’m not talking about autopilot. It’s your job, as it is today, to reduce your speed BEFORE the limit change.
So in my town there’s a speed trap that goes from 45 to 30, downhill. I slow down gradually especially when there’s snow.
Will this system communicate such things to the car? Or will the car automatically stomp on the breaks and potentially cause a spin out or collision?
My assumption would it be would work by limiting acceleration rather than enforced braking which could be dangerous. But we’ll have to see what system they come up with.
I think this has almost no chance of becoming law anyway.
Limiting acceleration could also be a safety issue in certain scenarios
Not limiting it is already a safety issue. It’s almost unthinkable that these situations would be more frequent or dangerous than speeding already is. But I’m curious what scenarios you are referring to. I can’t think of anything that is likely to happen with any regularity.
“But what if there’s a nuclear attack followed by a tsunami!?!” vs. “speeding drivers regularly kill people”. These aren’t legit worries people have, they’re excuses because they regularly speed and get upset that they might be compelled not to.
I completely agree. The silent downvotes usually speak to a lack of any coherent rebuttal.
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?
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.
Pre-download speed maps or passively receive speed broadcasts from the roadside.
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.
It says it allows the driver to temporarily override the speed restriction.
Then people will be doing that all the time.
Yep, I would have to hack it and disable it if I could. I’m not going to drive a nanny-state bullshit car like that.
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.
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.
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.
