All new cars now have to have speed limiters

[tsedge]

This came into force yesterday in the EU (and UK by default, since manufacturers don't seem to differentiate for our market).

https://www.autoweek.com/news/a61532276/mandatory-speed-limiters-europe-cars/

 

[fnegroni]

My son got delivery of a brand new car the other week, which defaults to enable audible speed alerts at every start, and has intelligent speed limit assist also selectable as a default. And I must say it works well and I’m glad it’s on by default.

I’ll duplicate here a comment I left on a YouTube video on this subject:

I think people are making this a bigger issue for themselves than it is, ignoring the fact the speed limits are there for a reason.
Bear in mind, most cars have speedometers that over-read by about 10%. In which case, when going at an indicated 30mph, you are really travelling at 27 mph or less.
The intelligent speed alert is meant to use gps speed; when you see 31,32,33mph, you are truly speeding.
So why the complaints?
I guess that people have the bizarre habit of driving at the speed indicated by the speedometer and think of the posted speed limit as some sort of target.
I see it all the time on the motorway: they slow down to 67mph just before a camera on the motorway, and are surprised when I pass them safely at a true 70mph. Then they might speed up again to an indicated 77mph which really is 73mph.
If they had just stuck to a true 70 mph there would have been no need to slow down and speed up again.
In town, if I pull out of a junction and I accelerate quickly to a true 30mph a few hundred yards before a 40mph speed limit sign, drivers on the road I’m pulling into are already doing well above 30mph because they are preparing for the oncoming 40mph limit, and are surprised I am not going above 30 yet.
This is unfortunately lack of awareness and proficiency.
The safety distance from the car in front is probably another one of those. How many people drive way too close to the car in front, and to make matters much worse, do not look farther ahead anticipating what is about to happen before it’s in front of their noses?
I have driven plenty of cars with these safety systems, they all allow for quick safety manoeuvres if necessary. If you want to speed, you still can. They are just alerting you that you are now going to take extra responsibility. And it’s not therefore necessary to do so all the time.
When I want to drive fast, I go to the track.
Having accidents on the track (I have) it’s so much safer than on the public open road.

 

[tsedge]

I don't disagree with you, especially about speeding, but such systems need to work well, accurately detecting the situation and MG EVs do not do that yet - the speed limit detection on mine is so laughably wrong most of the time that it is distracting and I just turn it off every journey. Similar for AEB and LKA.

So one argument is that the technology is not there yet and if you introduce sub-par tech you'll trigger a huge backlash against safety kit.

Also such systems do deskill drivers, people start to depend on them and stop concentrating, assuming the car will stop anything bad from happening. This creates a dependency cycle where people start to need the kit to drive, but it isn't about creating better drivers.

If we ever get to proper self-driving (ie no steering wheel or pedals), I'll accept that this is safer, but prior to that we should focus on raising driving standards not just drowning vehicles in safety kit.

 

[EVsince2016]

Try driving over the old Severn Bridge on the M48

Car always defaults to 15mph, there are no other speed signs, I think its a 70.

 

[fnegroni]

On my son’s car it works really well. It’s seldom confused, and when it is, it doesn’t interfere and it can be overridden in a number of ways.
It’s there to assist and alert mainly.

Even in the MG4 I use the manual speed limiter in combination with the speed alert system quite a lot.

It’s when people start complaining about the ‘intrusion into their driving’ or the ‘nanny state’ or ‘you can’t tell me what to do’ sort of conversations, that I start to think that perhaps they are generally competent behind the wheel, but also a bit arrogant and overestimate their abilities.
Which worries me because although I can see how disabling those systems can be done safely, I don’t trust their ability to actually know when those systems can be safely turned off.

 

[Rolfe]

Try driving over the old Severn Bridge on the M48

View attachment 27920

Car always defaults to 15mph, there are no other speed signs, I think its a 70.

I get this all the time on the A701, which is a 60 mph limit, but has signs indicating that the limit for HGVs is 40 mph. Someone else said that their car was picking up signs on the back of lorries and vans, indicating what speed the lorry or van was restricted to.

 

[Stuart Wright]

I get this all the time on the A701, which is a 60 mph limit, but has signs indicating that the limit for HGVs is 40 mph. Someone else said that their car was picking up signs on the back of lorries and vans, indicating what speed the lorry or van was restricted to.

Interesting. Would it be illegal to put a 20 sign

on the back of a lorry and potentially cause an accident?

 

[GaryMG4]

In addition to picking up signs on adjacent roads mine also fails to read the signs where the signs are not clean or partially obscured by vegetation or the placement of 'gate' at a village boundary.

 

[tsedge]

On my son’s car it works really well. It’s seldom confused, and when it is, it doesn’t interfere and it can be overridden in a number of ways.
It’s there to assist and alert mainly.

Even in the MG4 I use the manual speed limiter in combination with the speed alert system quite a lot.

It’s when people start complaining about the ‘intrusion into their driving’ or the ‘nanny state’ or ‘you can’t tell me what to do’ sort of conversations, that I start to think that perhaps they are generally competent behind the wheel, but also a bit arrogant and overestimate their abilities.
Which worries me because although I can see how disabling those systems can be done safely, I don’t trust their ability to actually know when those systems can be safely turned off.

Note that nobody in this conversation has used any of those terms you mention.

I agree it is all about driver ability - so why don't we raise standards rather than just work around it with technology?

 

[Stuart Wright]

I agree it is all about driver ability - so why don't we raise standards rather than just work around it with technology?

The driving test is supposed to regulate a minimum ability for drivers and the pass rate is about 50% and about 40% for automatics.
And those drivers in the Institute of Advanced Motorists are rewarded by cheaper insurance.
This does not excuse badly designed software in control of the LKA or other safety systems. In fact I believe that these systems should be continually improving in the move towards autonomous vehicles. Because humans are too flawed to be driving cars, honestly. For example would you design LKA to have emotions? So that it deliberately swerves towards cars driven by the person who had an affair with their partner to scare them?

 

[tsedge]

The driving test is supposed to regulate a minimum ability for drivers and the pass rate is about 50% and about 40% for automatics.
And those drivers in the Institute of Advanced Motorists are rewarded by cheaper insurance.
This does not excuse badly designed software in control of the LKA or other safety systems. In fact I believe that these systems should be continually improving in the move towards autonomous vehicles. Because humans are too flawed to be driving cars, honestly. For example would you design LKA to have emotions? So that it deliberately swerves towards cars driven by the person who had an affair with their partner to scare them?

I'm not against evolving tech, although it should be possible to permanently switch it off.

On driving standards, I'd like to see:

• Much bigger incentives to take an advanced driving test.
• Regular retesting every 5 years and 3 years over 70.
• National driver education programmes, like we used to see with TV, radio, online advertising.
• Extended "P" period of 2 years with supplementary training on considerate driving, developing the right skills.
• Bursaries for low income training, to offset increased costs.

 

[fnegroni]

Note that nobody in this conversation has used any of those terms you mention.

I agree it is all about driver ability - so why don't we raise standards rather than just work around it with technology?

Not in this conversation. You are absolutely right.
But I think this forum has several examples (just type the word ‘nanny’ in the search box for a taste )
Besides I was not referring to forum members in my post, it is a general thread about ‘the population’ and possibly in this conversation there have t been any yet as I, erm, preempted it ?

 

[mGizmo]

You could halve the accident rate in a month if you reprogrammed all the speed cameras to detect tailgating instead...

 

[fnegroni]

You could have the accident rate in a month if you reprogrammed all the speed cameras to detect tailgating instead...

edit

I quite like the idea, but I'm not quite sure the two are mutually exclusive everywhere.

 

[siteguru]

Re. the MG4 speed sign detection ... when I was driving south down the M74 last Friday my car was flashing 10 for a long stretch, as it had picked up the speed limit sign for the road into the DVSA weighbridge and scrutiny facility.

 

[Bam Bam]

We were driving on a dual carriageway the other day with the car flashing 30mph at me.

Would have been dangerous if we were limited to 30!

It would need to also link to some kind of GPS to determine the road in order to be a workable system.

A mixture of camera and GPS mapping might work, but each one on its own is clearly untenable.

 

[fnegroni]

I think we need to clarify how these speed assist systems work otherwise we might get carried away into mythology.

The law requires all vehicles sold in Europe, independently of their date of introduction on the market, to be equipped with speed limit assistance that by default has a warning component. (Eg my son’s Kia Stonic, introduced in 2017, and already equipped with road sign detection via camera and GPS, has been upgraded with an even more sophisticated system that now defaults to audible alerts rather than visual alerts only)

It was already the law that any new vehicles introduced to the market after June 2022 had to be equipped with some way of warning the driver that they might be going above the speed limit and to be on by default.

that’s the flashing speed limit sign on the MG4.

That’s all we are looking at in terms of minimum requirements.

Manufacturers can decide to offer further assistance and the definition of intelligent speed assist as per the European directive describes the systems that, through research, have been deemed the most effective.

The execution of the system would not allow for a speed limiter that, by default, limits your speed and doesn’t give you any warning before it does nor allows you to override it or even worse applies the brakes for you. That would be dangerous.

Hence my very first post in this thread: are we creating a problem out of nothing? Or are there specific examples we should be aware of?

On my son’s car the system uses the onboard camera and the GPS information. By default upon every start, the warning for going over the detected speed limit are audible, and this is a good thing
If the audible warnings are annoying, they can be disabled by long pressing a button on the steering wheel, the visual warning on the instrument cluster is still visible and instead of flashing on and off, it pulsates red.

If so desired, the intelligent speed limit assist can be taken one step further, by making it harder to go past the chosen speed limit, by slowing down the acceleration, but only up to a point, after which the driver can continue accelerating and the limiter will simply start flashing and emit beeps.
When the speed limit changes, the driver can, with a single push of the button, decide whether to limit the speed in acceleration to the new limit (whether lower or higher) or to retain the previous one or simply cancel the speed limiter altogether. The advantage is that it only requires the driver to press a button once to be alerted and assisted to whatever the new speed limit is.

So it categorically will not slam on the brakes when it gets confused by a 15mph limit on a dual carriageway, but it will cut the accelerator and alert you when it sees a 50mph limit and you are doing 60 if you accept the new limit.

On the MG4, they incorrectly implemented the intelligent speed limiter to limit your speed when it detects a lower or higher limit by a) adopting the new speed limit without confirmation from the driver and b) by cutting the accelerator without cutting the regen which is effectively like braking.

So if you have a specific model of car like the MG4 that implements it wrong, that’s what we should be complaining about.

When manufacturers get it right, these systems are great and can really assist drivers of all skill level

 

[AlexC]

I'm not against evolving tech, although it should be possible to permanently switch it off.

On driving standards, I'd like to see:

• Much bigger incentives to take an advanced driving test.
• Regular retesting every 5 years and 3 years over 70.
• National driver education programmes, like we used to see with TV, radio, online advertising.
• Extended "P" period of 2 years with supplementary training on considerate driving, developing the right skills.
• Bursaries for low income training, to offset increased costs.

Good idea. P plates should be mandatory for those just passed their test, for 1 year. Advancing driving should let you drive faster say on motorway / DC In Spain you gave to reduce speed by 10mph in rain, very sensible

 

[Conrad3]

You should drive in MK all dual carriage ways unless marked are 70 my ZSEV says you are speeding over 60 and in single unless told otherwise is 69 car says speeding over 40.

On the motorways it says speeding over 60 so something is out somewhere

 

[fnegroni]

You should drive in MK all dual carriage ways unless marked are 70 my ZSEV says you are speeding over 60 and in single unless told otherwise is 69 car says speeding over 40.

On the motorways it says speeding over 60 so something is out somewhere

This is because the MG4 system doesn't use GPS data to detect the type of road you are on at a bare minimum.
The UK is the only country I know of where the NSL varies based on road type, and it's utterly pathetic if you ask me.
It would cost very little to put 70 when it's a 70, 60 when it's a 60, and to put a decent amount of repeaters along a road especially immediately after junctions.
The speed recognition system would be more reliable, and people who don't use such would also not have to remember what a symbol means but simply be told

Sorry but it's pathetic that one still has to learn whether the speed limit is 60 or 70 by decoding the type of road. And let's see how many people get confused by whether a road is a dual carriageway or not ?