All new cars must have the devices from 7 July, adding fuel economy as well as safety. Will mpg become the new mph?
In the highway code and the law courts, there is no doubt what those big numbers in red circles mean. As a quick trip up any urban street or motorway with no enforcement cameras makes clear though, many drivers still regard speed signs as an aspiration rather than a limit.
Technology that will be required across Europe from this weekend may change that culture, because from 7 July all new cars sold in the EU and in Northern Ireland must have a range of technical safety features fitted as standard. The most notable of these is intelligent speed assistance – or colloquially, a speed limiter.
The rest of the UK is theoretically free, as ministers once liked to put it, to make the most of its post-Brexit freedoms, but the integrated nature of car manufacturing means new vehicles here will also be telling their drivers to take their foot off the accelerator. Combining satnav maps with a forward camera to read the road signs, they will automatically sound an alarm if driven too fast for the zone they are in.
It’s already a pretty common feature. My car has a speed limit sign reader and flashes a warning on the screen when you reach the speed limit.
It also has a button to set the car’s speed limiter to the detected speed limit.
It gets it wrong quite frequently though. Sometimes it misses signs and other times it picks up a sign on a side road that goes ahead where the road that you are on turns. I don’t know how it decides to handle national speed limit signs - sometimes it shows a national speed limit sign on the dash but other times it shows 60 or 70 instead.
My car happily understands 10tonn signs as 10km/h limit, or pedestrian crossings as motorway (130km/h max). It also hss zero awareness if a speed limit is still relevant (eg have we passed an intersection since).
I don’t have high trust in this tech currently.
Yeah they are passing laws before the tech has caught up.
Which would be first. Usually it’s the other way around, delayed by years of deaths.
Now if we could just get them to understand they need to listen to the tech experts.
Not for us plebs stuck in the past with our old vehicles 😅
I like the school zone ones where it shows 15 even though there is no flashing to indicate its 15. It’d need to be smarter to govern by this detection. Perhaps emitting a wireless signal even to make it harder to miss?