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[–] 163 points 2 years ago* (18 children)

Just glossing over implementation. So every car will have to have wireless communications of some sort? Will there be some government system that all California cars will have to be integrated with that tracks where they are at all times so the car can know the correct speed limit? A tracking system that surely would never be abused or turned into a surveillance device.

"I don't think it's at all an overreach, and I don't think most people would view it as an overreach, we have speed limits, I think most people support speed limits because people know that speed kills," Wiener said.

Not unless they think about it for five seconds.

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  • [–] 47 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Speed doesn't kill.

    It's the sudden stop that kills you.

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  • [–] 26 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Be careful, or politicians are gonna draft a bill preventing your from applying too much braking force too quickly. Thats about in line with the logic on this bill.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Funny enough, they already did long ago. It's call ABS. :)

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    Doesn't abs make you stop sooner than both slamming on locking braks or manually pumping them? Idk sounds like more of a sudden stop to me, congress gonna ban ABS next

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    ABS is designed to prevent the wheels from locking up and skidding. This reduces the total braking force applied a bit, because it's quickly pulsing the brakes, but is safer because you still have a bit of steering control.

    ABS does the same thing as pumping your brakes, just faster. And you don't need to and probably shouldn't pump the brakes on a car with ABS.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    Skidding also reduces braking force though, just from a perspective of car vs road, not break pad vs rotor. Unless im mistaken, and aside from control, anti lock breaks bring the car to a stop quicker, presuming traction break.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    ABS/pumping the brakes is implemented because sliding friction is less that static friction. It's why you can nudge something on a slope to start sliding and it doesn't stop but would have happily sat there before hand.

    Your car wheels experience static friction because while in motion the patch in contact with the road isn't moving. Or at least they do until you skid.

    So ABS brakes/releases to get a new round of static friction.

    Pumping the brakes is probably a phrase that came from before power assisted brakes (when you were manually pressurizing the hydraulics) but still had relevance because it was also ABS.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    One way I could think to implement it without any tracking or data connection connection with no data being transmitted from the vehicle would be by placing infrared strobe lights periodically along the road, possibly at the same places we already have speed limit signs. The flashing is invisible to the human eye but could be picked up by cameras on the vehicle, vary the speed or pattern of the strobe to indicate a different speed limit.

    Something pretty similar is already used by a lot of emergency vehicles to trigger green lights, just the arrangement is reversed with a strobe on the vehicle and a sensor on the traffic signal.

    Of course such a system would potentially be vulnerable to things like power outages (strobe can't strobe if it doesn't have power) bad weather (heavy fog, or if the camera and/orr strobe are covered in snow,) and someone could potentially circumvent it by just mounting a strobe light on their car pointed at the camera.

    You could probably address the snow/fog issue by locking the car to a lower speed if no strobe is detected, maybe 25 or 35mph, because in those conditions people should generally be driving slower anyway, and then you don't have the expense of needing to put strobes around lower speed areas. And the power issue could be addressed with the kind of solar panels and/or backup batteries that already power some streetlights and such.

    And for those who tamper with the system to circumvent it, we're never going to stop speeders entirely, but we can increase the fines to make up for lost revenue to keep police departments happy, they make less traffic stops and rake in the same amount of money.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    The infrastructure limitation could be resolved by using infrared reflectors along the road instead of lights. Have the car shine infrared light at the reflectors so it's cameras can read the code on them (like an infrared QR code, maybe?)

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    If we're going to use technically limitations on the vehicle side, we can simply continue to use optical recognition of speed signs instead of changing putting an IR transmitter on every speed sign. It's gotten really good in recent years.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Will there be some government system that all California cars will have to be integrated with that tracks where they are at all times

    We have that already. They are digital license plates. It's voluntary right now fortunately.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Folks… it’s available as a subscriptionnn!!!

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    I really don't understand why this is a product at all. What value does it provide me for $250/yr?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Saves a few seconds of applying registration stickers every year?

    Anti-theft…

    Kinda makes sense for fleet vehicles I think, where you’re already installing trackers anyway.

    Privacy nightmare for personal vehicles!

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I haven’t read the article, so just spitballing here: I have to assume the approach here is to electronically govern the engine to go no faster than the highest speed limit. I don’t know what the limits are in California, but where I live that’d mean the car would be limited to 80mph. If it was electronic, it could be adjusted if then limits were changed.

    Otherwise, it’d be insane, and require the crazy infrastructure you describe. And they simply don’t have the money or the wherewithal to build an actual coverage that would allow the limiter to dynamically scale all the time.

    Alternatively, I suppose you could imagine a hybrid system—ie an overall limited engine to the max limit, and then some sort of transponder that would throttle the limit down if you were near an important speed limit zone, like a school, which they could manage to deploy a transmitter at… still seems technologically challenging for the state to really pull off consistently though.

    Either way, yeah not a fan or including more required tracking tech in vehicles. I don’t think I’d really hate a reasonably limited car—I really can’t justify needing to drive over 80 ever really, even in an emergency, but it would drive me insane to have the car just magically throttling down whenever it thought it was time to. See

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    I read the article, it definitely doesn’t bother to think about how something like this would be implemented, but certainly seems to be referring to a dynamic Limiting system… good luck.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    Every car I've hired in the last ten years has the current speed limit displayed on the dashboard. It does not require the car to communicate any information, only to receive it.

    That is a different question from how car manufacturers could abuse the requirement to get more data to sell, of course. But there's nothing in this bill that would require the car to collect any data that isn't already publicly displayed by the roadside.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    There is already a good amount of wireless in most cars. We've had standards since the Bush administration for cars to wirelessly communicate with each other.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    I personally can't wait to start hacking cars going by on the freeway to make their top speed a negative value.

    That's going to be so much fun.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    So Uber already does this. Yes, you need to have GPS enabled, but Uber can tell when you're speeding. Same with insurance companies and their apps. The technology to determine what street you're on, what the limit is, and how fast you're going already exists.

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