EU Compulsory Vehicle Speed Limiters

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EU Compulsory Vehicle Speed Limiters

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EU Compulsory Vehicle Speed Limiters

See: https://www.driving.co.uk/news/speed...tory-new-cars/

Well I'm all for saving lives but we are dumbing down driver skills and attention to such an extent there is going to be all sorts of consequences long term.

Next step will be that humans are no longer allowed to drive vehicles.

And since when is the EU "United"?

I can't see the Germans accepting 80mph speed limits on their Autobahns on the grounds that: "it is against their human rights" So their cars will be limited to "unlimited" on relevant Autobahns. I once say a hight speed Autobahn accident and it was not a pretty sight.

Then we will have drivers who become reliant on the technology. They will put "pedal to the metal" and rely on technology to save them. Next minute due to a glitch, GPS jammer, etc. they will accelerate to 60mph in a school 20mph zone.

Then there are the exceptions - Police, Fire, Ambulance, not to mention military vehicles, diplomatic vehicles.

So the million dollar, Euro or Pound Sterling question. When we leave the EU we will be able apply more common sense to our UK motoring/vehicles?

Lastly and I find this point very real and chilling. If I was speeding in a 30 zone of my own volition and hit and possibly killed someone I would be devastated for the rest of my life. It is a natural and personal care and action to not knowingly or deliberately speed where road conditions, locations, safety and lower limits apply. I do not want my driving be dumbed down by artificial aids that I could later claim were at fault etc.

I think the older persons here will know that we as kids learnt by every mistake and dangerous activity we did and we are better and wiser for it. Conkers at school... Yes! Rugby ..... Yes! Having my hand or bum punished for doing serious wrong .... Yes!
 
Well I'm all for saving lives but we are dumbing down driver skills and attention to such an extent there is going to be all sorts of consequences long term.

I can't see the Germans accepting 80mph speed limits on their Autobahns on the grounds that: "it is against their human rights" So their cars will be limited to "unlimited" on relevant Autobahns. I once say a hight speed Autobahn accident and it was not a pretty sight.

Then we will have drivers who become reliant on the technology.
I think the older persons here will know that we as kids learnt by every mistake and dangerous activity we did and we are better and wiser for it. Conkers at school... Yes! Rugby ..... Yes! Having my hand or bum punished for doing serious wrong .... Yes!

Quite a bit of what we are seeing being incorporated into our cars these days is all stuff which is going to be needed and refined to work in driver less cars. (to some extent we are being the guinea pigs I think?) So yes, by it's very nature it's dumbing down traditional driver skills - I think it's actually dangerous and I hate it!

I drove a lot in Germany, The "low countries", Italy and France - and, less frequently most other European countries - in the late '60's/ early/mid '70's when I worked for Firestone. Czechoslovakia, driving from Prague airport down to Brno for the touring car championship (run on the old public road circuit in those days) was fun where a stretch of perfect high speed motorway would suddenly, without signage, turn into a single carriageway cobbled undulating country road! Try that at 60 to 70 mph (sorry don't do km/hr) on a rainy evening in a Mk1 Skoda Octavia! (actually, on reflection, you were probably being quite brave to do that speed on the good bit of road in the Skoda!) I rather liked the Autobahns where I found that once you understood that Big Mercs, Porsches, and the like would invariably be going very fast and expected right of way and that if some one indicated it didn't mean "I'm going to pull out, I think, if I can find a gap to get into" It meant "I'm going and I'm going NOW!" However when it all goes wrong, at those speeds, it's never good and I've seen a number of accidents where it was just not possible to identify the vehicles in any way - maybe only by a hub cap! Always fun to cross into Italy though where generally speaking absolutely anything goes (I'm talking many years ago of course). The Paris Périphérique probably takes the prize for most fun though without the extreme speed to get killed. We were once involved in a multi car pile up which wrote off (or so Avis later claimed) both our Simca rentals. I was very glad not to be driving as things got a bit heated with finance department for the chaps responsible.

Finally, Yes, humans, like it or not, seem to learn best by experience. I attended boarding schools - which largely fed people towards a military career - where the accent was quite heavily on DISCIPLINE. I use capitols advisedly. We were never strapped on the hand - perhaps considered too "sissy" - (although I learned later that that was common at my wife's school) The gym shoe and cane, both applied to the posterior, were the "weapon of choice" and were applied for almost any miscreance (is that a word?) I rarely got the cane - good thing too, "six of the best" really really hurt! But I, and quite a regular "gang" of other regulars, were to be seen waiting outside the Head's study of a Saturday morning for failing that weeks French and Latin tests to recieve six with the gym shoe! I had an a**e like leather by the time I moved on to college!
 
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We're more than capable of taking EU recommendations and turning them into really stupid draconian rules and laws.

In fact, without the moderation of the EU, we're likely to go off on a truly authoritarian tangent with ever more increasing surveillance and control.
 
I've just read an article about the limiters. Apparently they will use GPS data as one of the inputs.
Nearly every day I find speed limits at odds with what my satnav thinks. When the limiter slows others down wrongly, they may get hit from behind, or just cause unsafe overtakes.
Then when you catch someone choosing to do 3-5 mph under the limit, passing will be impossible. On dual-carriageways and motorways, we'll all be copying the trucks, taking a week to complete an overtake.
 
Built in nav. maps are never updated often enough for this to work... and Waze on my phone often has me driving through a field, 50 yards to the side of the road.

It can never happen unless GPS suddenly becomes properly and reliably accurate.
 
Currently the main satellites are American, and they reserve the right to encrypt them without notice.
There is a Russian set of satellites that many later phones use as well as, or instead of the American ones. Phones using both together can be quite accurate, but these can be turned off without notice too.
The EU are building a satellite network. No idea whether it is complete yet, but we could get excluded from those too. I wonder if those are included in the brexit negotiations?

Here's a plan, wait until we rely on driverless cars, then jam our satellite signals, watch the chaos.
Driverless cars will also use roadside beacons, but it'll take many years to install those. They talk about transmitters under the road surface, but we can't mend our potholes, so no budget for a complete rebuild with electronic inclusions. Be ready for driverless cars to be stopped everywhere, as the software gives up in despair.
 
It's about as likely to happen as this ridiculous idea that we can solve on-street BEV charging problems by installing charge points in every lamp-post...

(Because a 7kwh charger doesn't draw any more from the grid than a 35w sodium bulb, does it?)
 
I've got to be honest, the more I hear about all this guff that the EU and NCAP want to be fitted to cars, the more I intend to stick with older, outdated cars for as long as I possibly can!!!!
 
Mind you, none of this is law yet - for now, it is a proposal that still needs to be validated, first by European Parliament and then by national governments. Including the practical implementation ;)
 
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