[HN Gopher] New EU rules on car speed limiters coming into force
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New EU rules on car speed limiters coming into force
Author : dsego
Score : 22 points
Date : 2022-07-05 19:21 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.breakingnews.ie)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.breakingnews.ie)
| belorn wrote:
| > ISA detects speed limits on roads through devices such as
| cameras and satnavs.
|
| My car will regularly detect speed signs that are adjacent to the
| highway, including those next to interchanges and exists. On many
| other occasion the camera detects signs from parallel roads and
| railroads, where the sign sits simply on the other side of a
| chain fence.
|
| Naturally as a human driver I know that 170km/h doesn't exist on
| roads, or that a 30km/h isn't a legal speed for highway (except
| if there is road maintenance or accidents, which has their own
| contextual clues), but the computer don't know that. Trying to
| make computers understand context is the running theme of most
| failures in self driving cars.
|
| The only way I could see a speed limiter like this would work is
| if there were a central control system with local knowledge of
| the road and those on the road, similar to how a subway control,
| airport control or rail way control works. cameras and satnavs is
| only good as an advising tool for an human operative.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| > The only way I could see a speed limiter like this would work
| is if there were a central control system with local knowledge
| of the road and those on the road, similar to how a subway
| control, airport control or rail way control works.
|
| Now you're getting, it's all about the control. Once they've
| got the device in what's to stop the government from saying
| your car can go 0 miles an hour if they decide it is necessary?
| It's all about control my friend, all about control.
| IlPeach wrote:
| I had exactly this kind of problems on an Audi I was renting in
| Switzerland where the car started suddenly braking while going
| 110 on a motorway. Freaked the shit out of me and the cars
| behind me as well. Wtf
| hprotagonist wrote:
| Tangentially related, if I really want to (and occasionally, i
| do!), i can disable ABS by pulling the right fuse...
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Maybe one of the goals is to make driving so tedious that people
| happily adopt autonomous features.
|
| If someone puts up a fake speed limit sign and tricks your self-
| driving car to travel 30 mph under the actual limit, then you
| might not care, if you're having a snooze on a nice reclining
| seat.
|
| Still, I think it's not too early for governments to pass harsh
| laws against interfering with or obscuring road signs. With some
| clever networking and an open dataset, it might be possible for
| cars to detect such missing or altered signs within minutes of
| the crime being committed.
| analog31 wrote:
| >>>> Maybe one of the goals is to make driving so tedious that
| people happily adopt autonomous features.
|
| This has already been achieved in the US without any regulation
| at all, simply by increasing the amount of traffic on most
| roads.
|
| Maybe it's just that I'm getting old, but driving has gotten to
| be such a chore that I'm happy to let everything be automated.
| I've already switched to automatic transmission, lane assist,
| and adaptive cruise control.
| zeeZ wrote:
| My car has a speed limit detection system using a camera and a
| button I can press to change the speed limiter to the current
| detected value.
|
| It works most of the time, but where it doesn't, it would be a
| major pain if it was automatic or audible.
|
| My onramp to the Autobahn is limited to 80km/h due to a
| construction zone with the same limit on the Autobahn itself that
| ends just before the merge.
|
| The limit on the Autobahn is ended with a sign, but the one on my
| onramp is not. Technically I would have to keep driving 80 until
| I reach my exit, because that was the last posted limit and there
| are no other signs to change that. Since there are no signs, my
| car keeps showing me the 80 limit all the way.
|
| Realistically I can see the canceled limit sign across the bit of
| grass and divider at the end of the constructio,n and drive
| whatever speed seems appropriate in this unrestricted stretch.
|
| If the system was audible, would it beep at me the entire way? If
| it was automatic and try to limit me to 80, I'd cause a major
| traffic jam, because I'd be constantly passed by every single
| truck, blocking both of the available lanes. Their speedometers
| are better calibrated than mine, and I'd be going 77 while they
| keep at 89.
| Youden wrote:
| I think the title is a bit misleading.
|
| The mandate is for intelligent speed assistance. I own a car with
| such a feature and I think it's already pretty common in higher-
| end vehicles even without the mandate.
|
| The form it takes in my car is that there's a little symbol with
| the current speed limit displayed on the HUD. The speed limit is
| sourced from road signs or the car's navigation data. When you
| exceed the speed limit, the symbol turns red. Unless you engage
| "cruise control", that's it.
|
| If you do engage "cruise control", a few things happen. First,
| when the speed limit changes, the targeted cruise control speed
| will change and the car will either gently accelerate or gently
| decelerate (think 1kph of change in speed every second or so).
| You can always choose to override this by using the pedals,
| changing the set speed manually or turning it off.
|
| Another thing the car will do is use radar to maintain distance
| between you and the car in front of you (the distance is somewhat
| configurable), which will also mean maintaining speed and coming
| to a stop if the car in front of you does.
|
| However if you never turn on "cruise control", the feature is
| nothing but an easy to ignore red symbol on your HUD.
|
| I really like the feature. Combined with other features like lane
| keeping assist, it makes driving on the motorway quite relaxing
| (though you still need to pay attention, this isn't meant to
| allow you to fall asleep at the wheel or anything).
| b20000 wrote:
| the problem is that the car will limit your speed. it will not
| just alert you.
|
| this is incredibly dangerous as sometimes you need to drive
| over the speed limit to avoid accidents or dangerous drivers.
|
| instead of introducing this they should send drivers to driving
| school and make the police check driver licenses more often and
| arrest those driving without a license.
|
| in germany you can drive at any speed you want in certain areas
| of the autobahn and that's great and actually important to be
| able to get where you want efficiently. i doubt there are more
| accidents there. but people actually know how to drive and that
| is the difference.
|
| these kind of speed limiters are just introduced by politicians
| to gain votes, it's easy to sell the population on an idea to
| punish those driving too fast. easier than to do the right
| thing, which is to remove idiots who can't drive from traffic.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| This contradicts what the poster above you is saying. Do you
| have a car that behaves differently and doesn't let you
| override it, or are you making assumptions?
| abstractbeliefs wrote:
| The regulators permit something akin to kickdown. While the
| cars will limit you under gentle/steady state driving, if you
| floor the accelerator to avoid an accident, the limiters will
| disengage:
|
| 3.6.1.4. It shall be possible for the driver to override the
| SCF intervention by performing a positive action, for example
| by pressing the accelerator control harder or deeper.
|
| from https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-
| content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:...
| throwaway193948 wrote:
| my car has these features and sometimes thinks the speed limit
| is 100mph in residential neighborhoods
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| > or by the accelerator pedal gently pushing their foot back.
|
| > In some versions, the vehicle's speed is automatically
| reduced.
|
| Sounds to me like it isn't so optional, and of course how hard
| would it be to move it from optional to non-optional?
| johnisgood wrote:
| As I understand, you just have to have "cruise control"
| turned off, and these things will not happen.
| johnisgood wrote:
| That sounds much better. I would freak out if my car would
| accelerate or decelerate on its own, especially when it does
| not have to. As other people have said, I do not think the
| technology is there yet. Maybe in major cities, highways it
| might be possible, eventually, but forget A LOT of roads.
| someweirdperson wrote:
| If it stops beeping you've slowed down too much.
|
| Very convenient.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| >"In some versions, the vehicle's speed is automatically reduced.
| But users can ignore the warnings and override speed reductions."
|
| For now, there's no way this doesn't expand in scope at some
| point in the future.
| ukoki wrote:
| Seems incredibly dangerous. Imagine some bad GPS reading warps
| you from a highway to a school dropoff zone and decelerates you
| to 20mph
| galdosdi wrote:
| Minus the word "incredibly" which is quite an exaggeration, I
| agree. But, it can be made pretty safe. Entirely safe in
| fact, for good drivers (less so for shoddy ones)
|
| The fine details of implementation are not noted so we can
| only speculate. I would hope it's designed to very gradually
| start limiting the speed after X seconds of alerting the
| driver. That said, even the most naive design, which would
| work the same as RPM limiters (which all cars have to avoid
| engine damage) would just cut fuel injection whenever over
| the limit. This produces about the same effect as coasting in
| neutral, so even then you are going to coast to a stop very
| very gradually and have lots of time to make it to a
| shoulder.
|
| That said, even that does present some danger -- not to me or
| you of course, but you know, to shitty drivers who might not
| be accustomed to driving cars that fail at random and might
| panic and fail to cope appropriately with the situation. I
| mean, I have even ridden with drivers who are afraid to stop
| on the shoulder, even in a situation that warranted it, so
| it's bound to happen now and then. A manual override if
| available, will help here, but the pool of drivers dumb
| enough to still be startled into making a mistake will merely
| shrink then, not disappear.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| Actually I find this stuff pretty annoying already. Cars
| nowadays (some do it worse than others) "alert" you of lots
| of stuff. Such as "lane departure" beeps if you didn't use
| the blinker. Yes sure, using the blinker is a good idea. Is
| it really 100% necessary in all situations? Absolutely not.
| Of course technically the beeping car is correct and making
| you adhere to the rules of the road. In practice it's just
| annoying.
|
| Now queue this. This has the potential to really go
| incredibly wrong. You mention shoddy drivers for who it can
| be pretty unsafe. Even if there's only a tiny percentage of
| drivers out there that is shoddy, multiplied by the number
| of drivers, it's still a lot. And I would argue that the
| percentage of shoddy drivers is actually not such a tiny
| percentage but a larger one.
|
| This has to be automatically overridable. I.e. by simply
| hitting the gas pedal. It can't be something special you
| need to do. If there's a dangerous situation on the road
| that can only be avoided by speeding up beyond the speed
| limit, I don't have time to remember where that extra
| special button is that I almost never use. I need to be
| able to just hit the gas pedal. If you're wondering what
| situation that might be, there's actually such a situation
| that I remember from my driver's license test. Basically
| something unforeseen happens (don't remember the specific,
| but let's say a car shoots out of a hidden driveways or
| something) and you have no space on the left or right
| (let's say a bunch of trees, houses etc.) so you can't just
| go there. You don't have enough space to stop the car
| before hitting that car, so hitting the brakes is out of
| the question. You have oncoming traffic on the other lane
| as well but that car is still far enough away that if you
| shift down one gear and hit the gas pedal, you can swerve
| around the unforeseen obstacle without crashing head-on
| with the oncoming traffic on the other lane. I need one
| hand to shift, the other to steer and those two things
| already take all of my concentration not to mention the
| split second decision to see that braking will cause a
| crash while speeding up will save the day.
|
| Nice "trick question" though :)
| enlyth wrote:
| I actually wouldn't mind a thing like this that I can
| manually enable, I am constantly afraid of accidentally
| speeding and always have my satnav on so it shows the max
| speed (here in the UK we get penalty points, not just
| fines, and enough of them can mean you have a temp ban from
| driving). Don't really like the idea of this being
| automatically triggered and enforced though.
| efaref wrote:
| Automatic triggering seems like a recipe for disaster. My
| car has a version of this that shows the current speed
| limit on the display. It is frequently wrong. A road near
| me shows up as 20mph despite being 30 or 40 in different
| parts. Other times it sees signs for access roads or side
| roads and misinterpret them as for the current road
| (sometimes saying 20mph in a 60mph zone).
|
| It's a nice idea, but the tech really isn't there yet. I
| guess a few high profile incidents and they'll be forced
| to fix it.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| > enough of them can mean you have a temp ban from
| driving
|
| And it's not a lot. Being caught a bit over 3 times will
| lose you a licence, or 2 if you're a new driver.
| Sometimes you can get an awareness course and get a
| "pass" on the first time but I think only once every few
| years. Exceed the limit by too much and you don't get
| that option and you also get more points. You also will
| find insurance punishingly expensive for years
| afterwards.
| Hanschri wrote:
| I find it hard to believe that the car would base that solely
| on GPS readings, it will likely be a combination of multiple
| systems, including cameras which read signage as you pass it,
| which is already commonplace in many newer models.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Then you've never driven a Tesla :-)
|
| On autopilot they do periodically do absolutely insane
| stuff like this due to bad map data, gps drift, lack of
| recent speed sign reading etc
|
| And they are supposed to be best in class
| johnisgood wrote:
| ...and people think roads are perfect, too. That is a
| huge mistake. Try smaller cities in Eastern Europe. There
| is no way such a car could help you much there. When it
| comes to self-driving cars, yeah... no. It is really
| risky.
| yadaeno wrote:
| This is great, data shows that beeping is effective for
| increasing seatbelts usage, I see no reason why this wouldn't
| apply to speeding.
|
| I hope they take this a step further. Cars should not be able to
| exceed 90mph unless you have a special license for the track.
| 99.9% of drivers are not tracking their car and theres absolutely
| no reason a 6000lb pick up truck needs to go 150mph under any
| circumstance.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3217543/
| tomc1985 wrote:
| belorn wrote:
| How often do your seatbelt warning give out false positives?
| How high false rate would people accept before they
| removed/rigged the device?
|
| One major reason why ignition locks that uses breathalyzers has
| failed to gain popularity is false positives. Police always do
| a blood test after a positive breath test, because those
| breathalyzers have know faults when it comes to a number of
| substances, including bread, fruit, chewing gum, vanilla
| extract, vinegar and energy drinks...
| harg wrote:
| > How often do your seatbelt warning give out false
| positives?
|
| Never, in any car I've ever been in, have I seen a false
| positive seatbelt warning.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Exactly, that's his point: Those systems are tolerated
| _because_ they don 't have false positives.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Unlike the seatbelt chime which is easy to address, speeding
| beeps would be maddening. Everybody speeds at some point while
| driving somewhere. Not all speeding is reckless.
|
| As far as making someone get a special track license, that just
| seems like overkill.
| yadaeno wrote:
| "Speeding was a factor in 29% of all traffic fatalities in
| 2020, killing 11,258, or an average of over 30 people per
| day."
|
| Im not saying beeping will stop all of this but I think its a
| large low hanging fruit in terms of road safety. You will
| strongly disagree with this but mandatory breathalyzers are
| another.
|
| I would love if these rules were not necessary but drivers
| (in the US at least) have proven that they are not
| responsible in aggregate.
|
| I dont think anyone disagrees with speed limits, I dont
| understand the moral panic that comes from taking it a step
| further and building it into the car.
|
| Youre right about needing to speed sometimes though, maybe
| they need to add a 15% buffer or some kind of "10/10 data
| points in the last 5 mins required" condition.
|
| https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/motor-vehicle-
| safe...
| johnisgood wrote:
| He just told you though. Speeding happens, and there are
| many scenarios in which it is OK. Hearing the beeping might
| actually induce road rage... or not... I wonder though.
| vasco wrote:
| > I dont think anyone disagrees with speed limits
|
| Hello there, I disagree with speed limits on any highway,
| as well as most well built roads that don't have
| pedestrians adjacent. I'm not a civil engineer or traffic
| researcher, but I do disagree with them. Having ridden on
| the autobahn I also didn't feel less safe there.
| ultrarunner wrote:
| I also disagree with many (and most freeway) speed
| limits, but I also disagree with car-centric urban design
| and the zoning that makes it the least-bad option.
| Pedestrians (read: people, including those under 16 and
| over driving age) shouldn't be forced to deal with
| adjacent traffic just to go about their daily lives. I
| mention this because I suspect the person-traffic
| interface is a major justification for speed limits in
| the first place.
| spurgu wrote:
| The beeping is effective for me disabling the sensor/buzzer
| altogether in my cars. Fucking hell, I know when I'm not
| wearing it, or when I'm speeding. Let me be the judge of when I
| do whichever of them.
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