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.
Too many places set arbitrarily low speed limits (at least when talking about highways and freeways) because they want to increase revenue by handing out speeding tickets. Oftentimes, people driving too slow are way more of a danger to everyone than someone driving over the limit.
For example my state limits freeway speeds to >10MPH below every state bordering us. How can it be ‘unsafe’ to drive over 65MPH in one state but after crossing an imaginary line in the road it’s suddenly perfectly safe to be driving 75MPH?
I won’t argue that speeding in residential or pedestrian-heavy downtown areas is smart or safe, but a lot of the limits imposed on us are BS.