UK Satellites May Keep Cars From Speeding

Stiletto writes "According to this article, the British government is planning on forcing automobile manufacturers to install devices that allow satellites to monitor the vehicle's speed and control it when it is moving 'too fast.'" I suspect that any U.S. politician who tried to push through something like this would be out of office immediately. I can't speak for U.K. residents, but I bet it's the same there. Does anyone think *any* government could really get away with this?

Comments

This needs to be fought.

[AugstWest]

The issue here isn't speeding, it's monitoring. Technology must not be used to limit our freedoms, and we have to fight this everywhere we can as hard as we possibly can. If they can monitor your car to see how fast you're going, they can obviously monitor you to see where you are.

Governmental tracking systems cannot be allowed under any circumstances. Let's hope our bretheren in the UK are up to the fight.

*heavy sigh* Here we go again

[FascDot Killed My Pr]

I already see a bunch of "speeding saved my life" arguments cropping up here.

People, these arguments play right into Big Brother's hands. They can be easily countered with an argument based on increased hospital coverage (so there's always one closer to you), override switches that 911 operators can throw, etc.

No, resistance must be founded on fundamental human rights. i.e. Is it right that the government have the power to remotely control us? NO!. End of story.
---

only until...

[Haven]

If this passes I could see some of the headlines hitting the papers...

Man Shot to death because Satellites would not let him speed away from Car Jackers...

Here is what will happen...

CarJacker: Hey Gimme your car...

BritishGuy: No... Its my CAR!
[the BritishGuy speeds away]

CarJacker: Bloody hell...
{the CarJacker jumps into his accomplices car]

BritishGuy: CRIMENY! This bloody contraption won't let me go over 60Kilometers/hour! Oh no he's catching up!

CarJacker: Thank god we got that speed thingy removed from our car... lets shoot that guy and take is car.

[you know the rest of the story]

Accident avoidance

[Tau Zero]

Has anyone else ever avoided an accident by accelerating?

I've taken myself out of tight situations (much more likely to have a collision) into much less restricted ones by punching it on freeway entrance ramps and the like. I might briefly exceed 80 MPH doing this.

More to the point, what happens when the speed limiter kicks in when a driver mis-judges the available time to pass on a 2-lane road, and cannot get ahead in time to pull in? This leads to one of:

1. A head-on with the oncoming traffic.
2. A side-swipe with the traffic being passed.
3. A dive for the ditch, maybe colliding with trees or stones or a rollover.
4. Emergency braking by traffic on one or both sides of the road, leading to possible rear-end collisions.

This proposal is bone-headed in the extreme; perhaps it should be added to the cars of chronic lame drivers (along with reaction-time testers to stop them from driving while drunk/exhausted), but it would create at least as many problems as it solved for the masses. In this it reminds me of the flight-control system on the A320 which was directly responsible for the crash at the Paris Air Show some years back; because it was in "landing mode" it refused the pilot's command to throttle the engines up, and because it had inadequate power it refused the pilot's pitch-up force on the stick. Result: aircraft flew into a hill. Cause: Design of control software required pilot to press a "go around" button to get the aircraft to do what it was commanded to do. My analysis: It is dangerous and stupid to require persons who are operating vehicles to play games of "Simon Says" with some unthinking control system.
--

They pretty much already have.

[jd]

Coaches, busses and other oversized vehicles -MUST- have rev limiters fitted, by law. If these are removed, or disabled, in any way, shape or form, don't expect the judge to be merciful.

There are speed cameras mounted -everywhere-. Country lanes, suburban roads, motorways, etc. These automatically transmit the licence plate to a central computer, which prints & mails off the speeding ticket to the owner of the car.

There are -other- surveilance cameras, primarily around London, which monitor cars. If you enter London by car, expect to have your entire criminal record in the hands of the police, along with details of your car, plus your exact location in London. If you're the -least- bit suspicious, they'll probably check you out.

This is a far cry from some of the more interesting traffic control measures that have been tried in England, such as cardboard cut-outs of police cars, in strategically-located places, where drivers can't tell if it's real or not. It's worked very well, in the past, without infringing on anyone's rights and without costing the taxpayer an arm and a leg.

"Sleeping Policemen" (speed bumps to Americans) and cobblestone roads are other popular measures. (Cobblestones are marginally less popular, as they are more expensive and tend to get stern words from disabled & pensioner groups.)

But, it doesn't surprise me that they now want to go over to a full satelite system. Not that I'm going to blame the Government for this. That's unfair. Decisions are made by the Sir Humphrey Appleby's of the world. In short, by the Civil Service, not the Government.

(The Civil Service is an unelected body of politically neutral people who enact the wishes of the elected Government. Or so they say. In reality, they really run the country and the politicians are simply targets for the media to throw the rotten eggs at.)

Will this get through? The House of Lords is all but phased out, so there is no second house which can oppose the Government. (The reason the House of Lords has been killed off is that it kept opposing measures which would destroy democracy and freedom. That it was unelected gave it the freedom -to- be "controversial", rather than tow the line.)

IMHO, that leaves the only other unelected body that has much influence, and even that's on the wane - the Masons. In England, the Masons are an ultra-secret organisation, with considerable power and influence over everything. It's rare that you ever hear about them doing anything directly, though. Probably because that would destroy their carefully-preserved secrecy. However, this is the sort of thing that I can see the Masons taking an interest in, as it would seriously affect them. (Not just with respect to speeding, but the ability to monitor every car in England. It's harder to keep secrets when the Government knows where you are, at all times.)

This isn't going to inspire the all-out rebellion that the Poll Tax did, or generate the intense questioning that followed the Falklands War and the "mysterious" sinking of the General Belgrano.

If Britain is going to remain a free country, in any meaningful sense, it's going to have to rely on the whims of some senile old men and a mysterious, half-mythical super-secret organisation, all of whom the general public have been pelting rocks at for ages. I don't expect them to have much sympathy for their persecuters, now that the Government is pelting rocks of their own, but they -are- Britain's last best hope at remaining a democracy.

Boo!

[Skyshadow]

This is a Bad Thing(tm); if nothing else, it sets a bad prescident.

Speed limit enforcement is essentially a cop-out for those hard-to-prove things which, in reality, play a much larger role in causing traffic problems. For instance, tailgating causes more accidents than going 10 MPH over the limit on the interstate, but you almost never hear about someone getting a ticket for tailgating. Why? Because it's hard to prove -- there's no radar, just the officer's word for it.

Here's a list of other traffic infractions which the police should *really* pay attention to:

Reckless Driving: Unfortunately, this means "pissing off the cop" in my town -- the police tack it on when someone ticks them off, not for any particular driving behavior. Still, actual erratic driving causes accidents and should be policed.

Inattentive Driving: This is another one the cops add in when they're pissed. It deserves to be enforced properly, however. I can't count how many times I've seen idiots rooting for CDs or even *reading* while driving. Again, tell me that this isn't as bad as doing 10 MPH over the posted limit. As a special highlight to this, I'd point out that cell phone morons ought to be especially watched for. I mean, studies show that using a cell phone while driving causes as many accidents as OUI, but for some bizarre reason they're not regulated.

Not Signaling: I hate it when people don't use their blinkers. Older drivers (above 40) seem to be especially prone to doing this. As much as I advocate being unpredictable and spontanious in life, I'd suggest not doing so on the interstate.

Going too far under the limit: Just yesterday I was in a 55 zone (yes, I was doing 60) and almost struck a granny who was alternating between 30-35 MPH. I came up over a hill and there she was, practically standing still in her lane. People might *think* they're being safe by going under the limit, but if they go that far under they're actually a much larger hazard.

Old People: I'm not one of those pricks who thinks that drivers licenses should be revoked on your 70th birthday, but I do believe that some older people lose the ability to drive safely as they get older due to medical conditions. There ought to be a graduated system to make the roads safer for the rest of us -- for example, if a person can't pass a night vision test every five years, they ought to be prohibited from driving at night. This doesn't seem cruel and unusual to me; it seems like common sense.

I'm not saying that speed enforcement isn't an element of safety, I'm just saying that it doesn't deserve attention at the expense of other infractions (which are routinely ignored today). If the police and legislators were really interested in protecting drivers from accidents, these are the laws which would be enforced. Simple-minded speed limit enforcement is just a cop-out. Anyone have any additions?

----

Hack the satellite....

[Bob-K]

Can't wait for somebody to hack the satellite, and make all the cars go 500 kph.

Re:Scary stuff

[phil reed]

Actually, there is question regarding that, because while research shows that accidents are more lethal at high speeds, more accidents are being cause by people driving TOO SLOWLY.

Actually, I think you'll find the research shows the accidents happen because of the large disparity in speed. If everybody is going 70, there are fewer accidents than if some are going 60 and some are going 80.


...phil

This, and other misused tech, need to be fought.

[anticypher]

I have a whole list of objections to this system, as well as several other proposed recently. This is certainly going to be a long thread on comp.risks, where a more reasoned discussion will take place than on /. Technology is now regularly being used to monitor your every action, and there is less and less you can do about it. By your argument everyone who doesn't like it can stay locked in their homes, and never come outside. That is wrong, I shouldn't have to stay locked inside my home just to have a little privacy or to avoid being treated like a criminal.

This system will make use of a GPS/CDROM unit similar to the ones currently on the market. I've got one of those, and it is not all that accurate or reliable. It quite often forgets where the car was parked last time it was powered down, so for the first 5-20 minutes it tries to figure out where the car is. And any type of reflections in a city render it unusable, as well as driving in hilly country.

The GPS system is an ex american military system, and although the US has turned most control over to a civilian agency, it can still be overridden by the US military at any time. The system regularly has problems, outages, position shifts and other glitches, which is why no commercial airline is allowed to use it except as a backup secondary navigation unit. I can't see other governments allowing their citizens to be so heavily influenced in daily affairs by a system still controlled by the US military.

The CDROMs containing the map database (which can easily have speed limits added for each segment of road) are often quite out of date. My system has a CD only 6 months old, but it is still missing 10% of the main roads in place for years. The system has a nervous breakdown whenever I take a new freeway section through a forest.

So what happens when a local council changes the speed limit on a local stretch of road (perhaps up, since repaving or straightening), and nobody can drive the new speed limit? Same question, but what if a speed limit is lowered in a dangerous area, but millions of cars are still allowed to drive faster? With this system in place, many drivers will go as fast as the system will let them, and pay less attention to the posted limits.

What happens when some drivers have one limit in their databases, and other drivers have another?

What happens when the unit mistakes which road you are on (say a parallel frontage road with a much slower speed limit), and force you down suddenly to 25 MPH in a normal 65 MPH area? What happens if this happens to 20% of the drivers in an area?

What happens during a GPS satellite outage? What is the default behaviour during LoS?

Will the system be able to compensate for rain/snow/broken water main conditions? Or will drivers start driving whatever the maximum is, despite the weather dictating a slower speed?

What happens to court cases, when someone has a perfectly functioning unit and still gets a ticket? How will this affect law enforcement credibility when people can use the existence of the system as a viable defence?

For those who are tracking how our liberties are being threatened by new technologies, there has been a parallel threat from cell phone companies. I have seen cell techs watch their debug screens and show me drivers who are speeding on the autoroutes, it is just a function of predicting how often to hand off a phone from one cell to another. Recently a cell phone company in the US has put together a package (they want to make more $$$) to sell to state police forces. It will track cell phones moving too rapidly from one cell site to another, and provide position info as well as subscriber info to a waiting police cruiser. Hey, instant tickets. Don't like it, dont own a phone.


I can predict this system will not be mandatory at first, but will be offered as an option with a reduction in insurance rates. The first adopters will be the old biddies who never get near a speed limit, and want to save some money. Next will be the families, followed by young people desperate to save some money. After 50% of the cars on the road have the system, expect the laws to change to require it on all vehicles within a few years. That also gives the system a while to be debugged, and for the initial panic to die down. But I expect a few hundred extra deaths due to this system before they get the kinks worked out, mostly due to large speed mis-matches.

the AC