UPDATE 9/30/24: California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed SB 961 on September 28, 2024. The bill attempted to mandate the use of speed warning systems in most new vehicles sold in California. Newsom explained in his veto announcement that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) “already regulates vehicle safety standards, and adding California-specific requirements would create a patchwork of regulations that undermines this long-standing federal framework.” He went on to say that NHTA is “actively evaluating intelligent speed assistance systems, and imposing state-level mandates at this time risks disrupting these ongoing federal reviews.”
From the September/October 2024 issue of Car and driver.
If you exceed the speed limit in any of the 27 countries of the European Union, you may experience some resistance from your vehicle. From July, new cars sold in the EU must have a speed warning device that warns drivers if they exceed the posted limit. Vehicles must at least include acoustic or haptic speed warnings, although the European Commission is giving carmakers leeway to replace these passive measures with an active accelerator pedal that applies back pressure to the driver’s foot, or a controller that limits the vehicle’s speed to the permitted speed. to limit. Drivers can ignore or deactivate these warnings, but the devices must default to their active state at startup.
Are you coming to California in 2030?
Now California is trying to match the EU with legislation mandating speed warning devices in cars. The bill, SB 961, aims to make such systems standard in the Golden State by requiring virtually every model year 2030 vehicle equipped with GPS or a front-mounted camera to also receive visual and audio warnings when traveling faster than 10 miles. /u is driven. the speed limit. Provisions in the bill would ensure that drivers can switch off the systems completely.
Those in favor of the technology claim it can save lives — consider that in 2022, 18 percent of passenger vehicle drivers, or 8,236 people, involved in fatal crashes in the U.S. were speeding, according to NHTSA. Yet even safety advocates struggle to believe that written regulations can do much good. Graziella Jost, project director at the European Transport Safety Council who led a campaign that helped lead the charge for speed warning technology, believes the EU – and by extension California law – lack minimum requirements for the systems.
Jost notes that the European Transport Safety Council’s own testing shows that drivers generally find an audible warning annoying, making it likely they will disable such systems. Then there’s the problem of using camera-based character recognition technology to monitor speed limits. Jost points out the mediocre reliability of such a setup, as its capabilities rely on physical speed limit signs – posts that can appear irregularly or be obscured by traffic or the surrounding environment. The systems are also prone to misinterpreting more complex speed signs, such as school zone signs that only apply during certain hours of the day or conditional speed signs that vary for different vehicle types.
Ultimately, what the EU has implemented, and what California’s bill advocates, will irritate rather than deter drivers from speeding.
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