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International road safety experts are calling for all vehicles to be fitted with speed warning devices, and drivers who exceed the speed limit may find their accelerators disabled by devices that are being considered in Australia.
According to the experts "Driving too fast causes 1.25 million road traffic deaths a year globally, and is a major contributor to the 6.9 per cent increase in deaths on Australian roads to 1275 in the year ending August 31."
The road safety experts called for all European vehicles to be fitted with Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) devices. These use speed sign recognition and satellite information to warn drivers with sounds or message if they exceed the limit.
The council launched a campaign on YouTube to build support for ISA, saying it had a huge potential to save lives.
Some devices, which have already been integrated into some new models of Ford cars, have an override function that can stop speeding drivers from using the accelerator until they return to the speed limit.
Anyone want this fitted to their car? I can see problems...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 04 2016, @11:44AM
Forget about emergencies, what about normal driving? Isn't merging and passing going to be extremely difficult when people around you are traveling at max speed? What will police departments (in USA) do to make up for the lack of speeding ticket income? How easy will it be to tape a tiny 90 MPH picture to your sign camera? What about the increase in spray painted signs? How can you pull away from that crazy driver behind you? If someone slowly creeps up on you and is tailgating you'll never be able to pull ahead to a safe distance. What if zombies aren't slow? What about private roads and roads whose speed limits change based on season/time-of-day/events/etc...
That's completely ignoring GPS isn't a perfect system and is easily disabled. Good luck getting stuck at 10 MPH when some idiot points a signal repeater at you. The cheap ones are only around $40 though being cheap their range is only a few meters.
If you're in a life-threatening emergency you shouldn't be speeding. You're already in an altered state of mind and the injured person would almost certainly die in any type of crash. It's probably better for you to provide first aid and wait for the medics than let them bleed to death in the back seat. If they get worse you won't be able to perform CPR or whatever else they might need and that will kill them in your 15 minute drive to a hospital and another 5 minutes trying to convince someone there to help you when you show up unannounced and unexpected. Most births take awhile. No need to rush. If it is a fast birth, you'd still be better helping instead of driving.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 04 2016, @01:41PM
Good point. Actually, I've heard recently a radio broadcast about self-driving cars, where one of the things they told is that if the self-driving car follows exactly the allowed speed in dense traffic, it does not work well: People will overtake and go back to the lane very tightly, causing the autonomous car to temporarily slow down in order to restore the safety distance. Except that this slow down causes more people to overtake, causing even more slow-down by the same mechanism. The end result is that the car ends up to be a slow-moving obstacle about which neither those in that car nor those in the cars around them will be very happy.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday October 04 2016, @05:19PM
It is dangerous to go at a speed significantly different fro the traffic around you.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Tuesday October 04 2016, @05:14PM
How can you pull away from that crazy driver behind you? If someone slowly creeps up on you and is tailgating you'll never be able to pull ahead to a safe distance.
If you speed up, he'll speed up too and he'll be tailgating at an even more unsafe speed.
The only remedy is to slow down until his distance becomes safe. Chance are, he'll take the opportunity to pass you and your worry will be over.