Courtesy of lobbyists and uk.gov… News from the I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Utter-Bollocks department: over the past week, plans have once again been quietly introduced to the public to implement voluntary speed limiting systems… In peoples’ cars. This idea is so fundamentally flawed it’s just ridiculous, but I’ll break each point down and explain just how stupid an idea this whole thing is in a little bit.
Let’s take a look at the raw story shall we? The Guardian paints the picture well:
An automatic speed limiting device should be fitted to cars on a voluntary basis to prevent up to 29% of injury accidents, according to a report by a government advisory committee published today. The device uses satellite positioning to slow down a car to within the speed limit of the local road.
The Commission for Integrated Transport and Motorists’ Forum said the system would also reduce carbon emissions. It would use detailed digital maps containing the speed limit for every British road. The devices would be voluntary and should have a manual override feature for overtaking, the groups said.
John Lewis, who chaired the panel, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “You can override the device that we’re talking about, either by pressing a button on the steering wheel or by kicking down the accelerator as you would on an automatic car.
“But we conducted trials with 20 cars and 80 different drivers over an extended period, and actually the drivers found they changed their habits and changed their behaviour and might not have taken the risk of overtaking.”
Thankfully, Humanity is not entirely bereft of common sense – I’m not the only person who’s been pointing out the pitfalls of this idea. Here are some of the proponents’ favourite reasons for being in favour of the system:
- By allowing the system to reduce your car’s speed automatically (by reducing engine power and braking for you when approaching a lower speed limit) the driver doesn’t have to concentrate on keeping their speed in check, and their driving habits will subsequently adjust to allow the system to perform this task all the time;
- By ensuring vehicles stick to the appropriate speed limits throughout the UK road network, CO2 emissions are reduced, thereby contributing to a more eco-friendly nation of drivers;
- Likewise, as vehicles will be travelling at a slower speed, fewer accidents will occur. (“The report by the Commission for Integrated Transport and the Motorists’ Forum claimed accidents involving injuries could be cut by 12% if the system was adopted universally – with a manual override system – and by more if the speed limiter was mandatory and always on.”);
- Â By enforcing these maximum speed limits, journey times will improve in consistency and fewer traffic jams will occur – particularly on motorways.
…Time to pick these claims apart and show them for the fallacies or extremes of wishful thinking that they are.
- Enforced speed limits are already enforced on HGVs in the UK, resulting in drivers of large HGVs (mainly articulated lorries) only being able to reach 56mph on motorways. There have been past cases where, because drivers sometimes just drive with their right foot flat on the floor, they go into ‘zombie mode’ after hours of monotonous motorway driving – and accidents have arisen as a result of the driver’s attention going AWOL. Some may contend that a driver should always be attentive when behind the wheel, but when some aspect of a vehicle’s control is removed from the driver, this kind of scenario is to be expected!
- Whilst a small reduction in CO2 emissions may result from compliance with the 70mph motorway limit (quoted at around 6% in several national newspapers), this figure relies on a mandatory 100% adoption of the speed limiting technology. Anything less than a mandatory rollout for 100% of UK vehicles immediately prevents this best-scenario figure being reached. However, the Department for Transport’s initial consultation on a third runway at Heathrow being built shows that overall CO2 emissions would rise by 2.6 million tonnes a year – how’s that 80% reduction of CO2 emissions by 2050 target coming along Mr. Brown?Also, vehicles’ engines are generally less efficient at lower speeds if they are not operating in the correct rev range (and the correct gear), with many vehicles’ gear ratios optimised for European speed limits – so an engine may perform far more efficiently when cruising around 40mph than it may do at 30mph! This is also true for high speeds; my Dad’s Toyota Avensis – when driven ‘greenly’ – can perform at more than 80mpg when cruising at 80mph in sixth gear, whereas 70mph is almost inbetween the ratios for fifth and sixth gears, meaning you either have to slow towards 60mph to stay in the optimal rev range for fifth gear, or break the speed limit to obtain better fuel economy and lower CO2 emissions. Whilst this is not an excuse for speeding in itself, it is a multi-faceted issue which must be addressed by the car manufacturers as well as the Government. Simply enforcing a lower speed limit with a Black Box will not automatically result in lower CO2 emissions, and may in fact do far more harm than good in the long run.
- An interesting statistic of note is that the UK already has the lowest fatality rate for road traffic accidents of any European country – so we must be doing something right already without computer-enforced speed limits, no? And, just like the optimistic figures claimed by the Government and various lobby groups – 29% reduction in accidents if the system was put into place in 100% of vehicles, 12% if only fitted to some vehicles – is assuming that people won’t override the system at every possible opportunity!
 - Accidents involving drivers driving ‘without due care and attention’ (as the Police would define it, I’m sure) may also end up raising this overall road traffic accident statistic, as more drivers and their vehicles are involved in pretty grisly crashes when they forget about the speed limitations imposed on their vehicles during an overtaking manoeuvre (or when an older vehicle not fitted with the system is tailgating a newer, limited vehicle when going into a lower speed limit zone). Fender benders are bad enough, but imagine a car travelling at 60mph (where the driver has simply eased off the accelerator in order to gradually slow to 30mph in a safe and predictable manner) ploughs into a vehicle which has rapidly decelerated to 30mph! That could quickly get quite ugly, and end up in higher insurance premiums – the exact opposite of what some proponents have claimed will happen. (If you don’t believe how fast a speed limited vehicle would slow down, see this BBC News video where a reporter test drives a demo vehicle entering a 40mph speed limit zone – it surprises even him, leading him to remark that it feels like “someone else is driving.”)As The Guardian’s article on the matter quotes:Claire Armstrong, from the road safety charity Safe Speed, told the BBC that the device would be “highly dangerous” for driver reactions. “You’ve taken the responsibility away from the driver,” she said.Â
Derek Charters, from the Motor Industry Research Association, added: “The last thing you need is one car to be overtaking and then pull back in, in front of the cars in front, because that braking event will then cause everybody to start to slow down, which will then compress the traffic, which then causes an incident.”
Exactly.
My other issue with this idea are that an element of driving is going to be removed from my responsibility – I have the responsibility to generally operate my vehicle’s controls as I see fit, and I am appropriately qualified to do this with a full UK Manual Driving Licence (and I have paid handsomely for this privilege). Part of my entitlement to drive is the acceptance that I will adhere to speed limits and drive in a safe manner – why do some people now deem it appropriate for this aspect of driving to be taken out of my hands and placed under the control of a closed loop system?
Arranging a system in this manner also presents some ‘interesting technical challenges.’ For starters, as soon as a system exists to restrict users, a bustling underground market in tools and knowledge to remove these restrictions appears (take a look at the aftermarket companies that offer ECU modifications to remove the GPS-based 180kph limit that Nissan enforce on their GT-R, in compliance with Japanese law). But what could the vectors of attack be for an in-car, automated speed-limiting device?
- The device is simply removed by the driver or other person with adequate technical ability after buying the car
- Pitfall: uk.gov would probably introduce law making such tampering illegal and subject to regular checks as part of MOT
- Pitfall: could reduce resale value of car… if inclusion of speed limiting hardware is viewed as adding value
Â
- The device’s inbuilt maps are replaced with hacked, ‘carte blanche’ third party versions with blanket 200mph limit (or other suitably high limit to encompass every UK road-legal vehicle)
- Pitfall:  the device could include integrity checks for the mapping files, in an attempt to ensure that the maps are not replaced with unauthorised versions. However, given the increasing ease of breaking encryption (based on past history of encryption schemes – and some fairly recent news about industry-standard SSL encryption being compromised using consumer hardware and some expert knowhow), then I would not expect the integrity of the supplied maps to last very long.Another problem with leaving a device in the hands of the user is that sooner or later, someone will crack the unit open and set about investigating its innards – so reverse-engineering of the hardware to obtain the private keys is another distinct possibility.
- As any unit would rely on a constant GPS signal to accurately detect the car’s location, if that signal were to… disappear… or be too intermittent for a reliable lock… then the system would be rendered next-to-useless.
- Pitfall: of course, doing so may introduce a default limit of 70mph when no lock can be obtained, but then that still renders the device completely useless when driving through urban centres or through other speed limit zones. I would wager that this kind of hack could even be peformed with a good bit of tinfoil ‘insulation’ over the GPS receiver, or maybe a small lead case to cap the GPS receiver unit. Quick and dirty, and far more easily removeable when taking the car in for an MOT or check of the system.
- Pitfall: what about people driving through tunnels? TomTom, Garmin et al only know roughly where you are when a lock is lost because it knows the route it has calculated for you in advance (and just takes an educated guess as to your progress based on previous speed of the vehicle and the road). For continuous on-the-fly calculation, such as the speed limiting device uses, loss of a GPS lock precludes any kind of ‘useful’ operation.
Â
- If the device was to include some kind of realtime call-and-response using the mobile phone network, this would also prove very costly for uk.gov for both the upkeep of the subscriptions to the phone network for data access and the MASSIVE infrastructure required at their end for verification and logging. (Like hell am I going to pay to be checked up on, never mind the cost of the equipment in the first place!) Just the cost of including SIMs and arranging blanket access on all the UK mobile networks, in order to perform subsequent piecemeal updates of the speed limit data and/or verify the integrity of the hardware, software and map data, would be prohibitively expensive and also, I can foresee, quite problematic. (What was the planned cost of these units to the road user again?)Â What happens when there’s no phone signal? What happens if that bit of tinfoil you have left over from ‘insulating’ the GPS receiver is wrapped around the GSM transceiver to keep it safe?
Â
As you can see, there are too many potential problems which uk.gov will doubtless gloss over in a vain attempt to enforce UK law in an absolute manner, to the detriment of road safety and optimal driving techniques. UK law has always succeeded by being implemented and enforced in a discretionary manner; our constitution was one of only two major countries in the world to be partially codified (a rarity) yet the entire Parliamentary system has operated without revolt, major reform or revolution for over 600 years. The Police have always been held in high regard for encouraging the use of common sense by its officers when enforcing the Law – an example of this is a driver, who has committed several moving traffic offences, is stopped and cautioned – but maybe not formally so – and receives no permanent penalty aside from a stern talking to and a reminder to not repeat his actions again lest he be punished far more harshly.
This tactful approach I consider to work far better than a blanket “you have sinned therefore you will be punished to the fullest extent of the law”, because almost everything in life has shades of grey to it. The only thing that is black and white in life is the fact that we will all be born and we will all die at some point in our lives!
Â
Oh, and of course – fixed speed cameras won’t disappear, as uk.gov will be completely unable to fit these devices to motorbikes and older vehicles (if the rollout is not made mandatory), particularly as it would be far too dangerous for bikes. While a four wheeled vehicle braking is not safe if it is unexpected, it is still far safer than a two wheeled  vehicle braking quickly with no other form of stabilisation. (Have you ever seen a bike fishtail and go into a 50mph tankslapper after the wheels lock under braking, with rider flying off into the sunset in the opposite direction?)
Yet another criteria to consider – what about when in wet, icy or snowy conditions? Many people respect the dangerous conditions by lowering their driving speeds, but what about the people who drive do not appreciate the increased level of difficulty and plough on at the maximum speed possible? An automated speed limiting device is designed to stop a vehicle exceeding a maximum speed limit, it is not designed to protect a driver from their own stupidity – and it is usually the stupidest drivers in the country who are at fault in most road accidents, and I would argue that the introduction of a speed limiting device would make next to no difference.
Â
The only possible useful application for a device of this nature would be to enforce a maximum speed limit for drivers who have been prosecuted for exceeding the speed limit – instead of losing your licence for exceeding 100mph on the motorway, for example, they are instead allowed to keep their licence but are limited to 60mph on the motorway, just like HGVs, and are limited to 50mph in a 60mph zone and 25mph in a 30mph zone. This could be enforced for a standard, fixed period of time. This is something I would fully support, but only as a form of punishment for being convicted of a speeding-related offence – do not condescendingly introduce this as a form of road safety and environmental improvement when it is nothing of the sort.
In the current form in which this system is being introduced to the general public, it is patently useless and, frankly, wholly inadequate for implementation in any law-abiding UK road user’s vehicle – either in current or future, ‘refined’ form. I will staunchly oppose any such plans for rollout in the UK, and I suggest you do too. Government’s going slightly mad in its old age.
Â