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.
My dad got something similar build into his car, its wrong so many times especially when road signs are confusing at construction sites.
Example: Construction site limits speed to 60kmh and there is an exit coming up that goes through the actual construction site, that has a speed limit on the the exit of 30kmh, guess what. The car sees the 30kmh sign but doesnt understand its only for cars exiting but alarms the driver now until.the next 60kmh sign.
So in order for this to work properly road signs have to be normalized all around the EU, which i don’t see happening anytime soon.
I didn’t see anywhere in the article how this will be implemented. Are we sure it uses sign recognition as opposed to GPS or some other method?
My car uses a mix of GPS and camera, and I’m using Android Auto, which uses only GPS. There are several cases where both are wrong either
So yeah that’s going to be fun… Like my car telling me I should drive a 30 limit instead of 110 on the highway (did happen several times)
Gps will never know accidents, construction or anything alike that is temporary
Worse is the other way around, but if you then speed because the system doesn’t work, it’s of course still your own fault.
I know why they want it and I mostly agree, but they’re massively downplaying the reliability concerns, saying it is “usually correct” (It’s not) and “data will improve”, conveniently ignoring that these underlying systems aren’t new and the data has consistently sucked over its entire lifetime. They don’t provide a target date by which they want this data to be available, so it will never be.
Anecdotally, on a 30km drive, my car (which receives updates to nav data over cellular) is wrong 5-10 times, in both directions.