Telegraph.
All cars could be fitted with devices that stop them going over 70mph, under new EU road safety measures which aim to cut deaths from road accidents by a third.One of the biggest dangers facing drivers who have speed limiters on their cars is that at the top speed, they cannot accelerate out of danger. There are often times when braking or remaining at the same speed will cause an accident, particularly if you're being tailgated (which still happens new law or not) Sometimes the only solution is to accelerate out of the way and get past the problem. Sure it's not all the time, but having driven a van owned by the company I work for which has a speed limiter set to 68mph I swiftly discovered that the extra burst of speed necessary to get out of the way of a problem was only available if I reduced speed to 60mph and played with the big boys (lorry drivers) and so made a nuisance of myself on the M25 by constantly weaving around trucks by accelerating and decelerating rather than deal with the nuisances in one fell swoop. Now imagine a situation where everyone was doing that on England's crowded roads where road deaths are at an all time low anyway? Indeed UK drivers are rated as the third best in Europe, after Germany (which has no speed limits on the autobahns) and Sweden, which has far fewer cars on the road.
Under the proposals new cars would be fitted with cameras that could read road speed limit signs and automatically apply the brakes when this is exceeded. Patrick McLoughlin, the Transport Secretary, is said to be opposed to the plans, which could also mean existing cars are sent to garages to be fitted with the speed limiters, preventing them from going over 70mph. The new measures have been announced by the European Commission’s Mobility and Transport Department as a measure to reduce the 30,000 people who die on the roads in Europe every year.
Perhaps the EU would be better off bringing their drivers up to our standards before imposing a dangerous measure on us first.
This is however the EU we're speaking about which means that control, rather than compliance is the rule...
5 annotations:
This is actually a measure to reduce unemployment in Europe.
Since the vast majority of road deaths occur at much lower speeds, on implementation and the subsequent realisation it has not affected the rate of accidents (downwards anyway), they'll drop the limit.
Eventually it will be at 4 mph and literally thousands of jobs as man (oops) I mean 'person walking (rolling or sashaying) in front with a flag (EU), high-viz vest (unisex) and H&S approved whistle (biodegradable, non-ingestable, decibel-limited)' will be created.
How can you even question the logic, do you 'want' all those cheeldren run over?
Oh, and the rumour that the head of the European Commission’s Mobility and Transport Department is a director of Vehicle Speed-limiters Inc., and has significant shares in Flags-U-Like, Vizivest and Gaia-whistles (Tm), is a base calumny
For my money, this is the old "solution looking for a problem" bollocks again. You see, after the Americans magnanimously decided to let the entire world use GPS without their inbuilt fuzzing factor, the premise for the EU's Galileo system became rather weak. The original premise was so Europe could have a satellite positioning system that nobody else could turn off at will.
The basic problem with this is that now that you can use American GPS and use phone mast data to improve it to an accuracy of a few inches, nobody in their right mind would pay money for Galileo which could not even get near that accuracy. However, large sections of the EU high command have ego invested in Galileo, so it absolutely must get built as ego is far, far more important than pissing away several tens of billions of other peoples' money.
So, the EU needs a problem. How's about forcing everybody to have a speed limiter in their car, which uses (wait for it) Galileo positioning thus giving a white elephant a job and saving many a high muckamuck's ego project?
This is what all this shite is about: tis a solution looking for a problem.
How often do you see two HGVs, both with speed limiters fitted, with one being able to go 3mph faster than the other one and so trying to overtake, usually on a dual carriageway or 2 lane motorway. The whole procedures seems to take hours, especially if the driver being overtaken doesn't ease off the throttle. The result is that a build up of very angry motorists queues up in the outside lane. This is how tempers get frayed, driving mistakes are made when accelerating past the two lorries, and collisions occur. Apart from the connections between our European masters and the firms producing these devices, who would like to assume that all official EU cars will have the same regulators fitted?
Penseivat
I would never, ever even think of driving any vehicle over which I did not have absolute control.
If there was the slightest possibility that some silicon-based 'brain' could intrude on my control, I'd burn the vehicle.
I am consoled by the fact that any system devised by man can be bollixed by another man!
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