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This effort feels like another example of the government's desire to push law enforcement into the private sector. Mandate speed limiters > car companies have t

by 015a 3y ago

This effort feels like another example of the government's desire to push law enforcement into the private sector. Mandate speed limiters > car companies have to pay for it > cars get more expensive > consumers have to pay for it. That's been the USG's go-to for years now, and its frankly unsustainable. California has issued 3,000 speeding tickets to drivers going over 100mph, per month. Do these people still have their license? Why? I think there's so many perverse incentives in speeding tickets that its hard to have an objective discussion about it. Speeding tickets represent a massive portion of county budgets in rural areas of the country; they're not going to be happy automating that income away. Its also interesting to think about how this impacts punishment today; they can't make the punishment too high, because then their revenue is impacted. Nationally, we can't set punishments at levels which actually impact behavior because we're too dependent on cars, and removing peoples' access to them is, reasonably, a cruel punishment.

oivey 3y ago
Almost certainly adding a speed limiter to a modern car would cost effectively $0. This is a dumb regulation, but “regulation always makes products more expensive” trope is silly, too.
- imgabe 3y ago
  Why would it cost $0? It had to be designed, tested, manufacturing lines have to be modified to install it, it has to go through whatever approval process to make sure it complies with the law. What part of this sounds like it costs $0?
  - ttfkam 3y ago
    From the linked article: > Modern automobiles do use governors to limit engine damage, but the threshold is set absurdly high, often at 155 mph. Even safety-conscious Volvo allows its cars to reach 112 mph, 27 mph faster than the highest speed limit anywhere in the U.S. It's already there. They just need to adjust from 150 down to 100. Sounds substantially similar to $0 to me.
    - imgabe 3y ago
      That’s not what they’re proposing though: > NTSB’s proposed solution: Adopting Intelligent Speed Assist (ISA), a modern and techier version of the speed governors that Cincinnati considered a century ago. Rather than preventing a vehicle from ever exceeding a given threshold, ISA uses geolocation to automatically reflect the legal limit on a given street or highway.
      - ttfkam 3y ago
        That's because they want to restrict notably lower than 100mph, which is location-dependent. But we can already restrict to 100 (or 90) without geolocation and extra costs. NTSB's proposal is a stretch goal.
  - oivey 3y ago
    The median new car price in the US was $46k. The amortized cost of such a component would be a rounding error. Not only that, as another commenter and TFA point out, cars already have software limiters installed to prevent engine damage. Seemingly lowering the number is even cheaper than adding an entirely new component would be anyway. It’s bad regulation because it’s ineffective at solving the actual issue, which is reckless and impaired driving.
    - imgabe 3y ago
      Also as TFA pointed out, simply changing the setting of the existing limiter is not what they’re proposing: > NTSB’s proposed solution: Adopting Intelligent Speed Assist (ISA), a modern and techier version of the speed governors that Cincinnati considered a century ago. Rather than preventing a vehicle from ever exceeding a given threshold, ISA uses geolocation to automatically reflect the legal limit on a given street or highway. Someone has to compile this database of geolocations of every speed limit in the country and write software to fetch it and adjust the governor on the fly. That doesn’t cost $0.
      - oivey 3y ago
        That database already exists and many new cars have it anyway. My mid range Honda from 2018 has it, for example. Clearly, Honda and Acura wouldn’t need to develop such a thing, and I’m guessing neither would virtually any other manufacturer. Money isn’t the problem. If you ask people “should we increase the average cost of a car by $10 so that 15k fewer people die every year” most people will (correctly) answer yes. The issue is that it won’t save that many people, and it doesn’t do anything to solve the actual issue.
        imgabe 3y ago
        There is still all the software to control the speed. It’s pretty astonishing that people here are naive enough to think that at any organization with the level of bureaucracy of the average car company this would cost $0. This isn’t your weekend side project where you change a few lines of code and push it to GitHub and it’s done. The meetings to begin to consider the change would probably cost a million dollars.
- 015a 3y ago
  I don't feel that mechanically, or even electronically, affecting the engine behavior by installing a general purpose computer that is capable of reading from a centralized database of geolocated speed limits would cost, effectively, $0. Also, no one asserted that regulation always makes products more expensive.
  - mattlondon 3y ago
    Many many cars already have something similar as a table stakes feature: they show the current speed limit that you are driving on, either via some of sort database and/or sign recognition. Adding a few lines of code to limit the speed to that +20mph or whatever would be almost zero cost
    - 015a 3y ago
      Sure. Expensive cars already have that. Car regulations have, almost universally, increased the cost of automobiles. The typical counter-argument to this is that it reduces the national cost-burden of an automobile-ized society by reducing the number of collisions and deaths; events of objective destruction that destroy value. Its a reasonable first-order argument, but it also feels too shallow to take entirely at face value, as it fails to consider the aggregate depreciation-value of the increased cost of automobiles after they're produced.
lll-o-lll 3y ago
It’s also incredibly stupid, like that US city that sold its parking meters to a private company and lost billions with a B. Here in Australia, the speeding problem is essentially solved with speed cameras and the like; which makes the government So Much Money. Not that I like this; it’s too much and is clearly revenue raising. Still, the point is that if you are a government, this is the way. It’s worked here anyway.

by 015a 3y ago

oivey 3y ago

Almost certainly adding a speed limiter to a modern car would cost effectively $0. This is a dumb regulation, but “regulation always makes products more expensive” trope is silly, too.

imgabe 3y ago
Why would it cost $0? It had to be designed, tested, manufacturing lines have to be modified to install it, it has to go through whatever approval process to make sure it complies with the law. What part of this sounds like it costs $0?
- ttfkam 3y ago
  From the linked article: > Modern automobiles do use governors to limit engine damage, but the threshold is set absurdly high, often at 155 mph. Even safety-conscious Volvo allows its cars to reach 112 mph, 27 mph faster than the highest speed limit anywhere in the U.S. It's already there. They just need to adjust from 150 down to 100. Sounds substantially similar to $0 to me.
  - imgabe 3y ago
    That’s not what they’re proposing though: > NTSB’s proposed solution: Adopting Intelligent Speed Assist (ISA), a modern and techier version of the speed governors that Cincinnati considered a century ago. Rather than preventing a vehicle from ever exceeding a given threshold, ISA uses geolocation to automatically reflect the legal limit on a given street or highway.
    - ttfkam 3y ago
      That's because they want to restrict notably lower than 100mph, which is location-dependent. But we can already restrict to 100 (or 90) without geolocation and extra costs. NTSB's proposal is a stretch goal.
- oivey 3y ago
  The median new car price in the US was $46k. The amortized cost of such a component would be a rounding error. Not only that, as another commenter and TFA point out, cars already have software limiters installed to prevent engine damage. Seemingly lowering the number is even cheaper than adding an entirely new component would be anyway. It’s bad regulation because it’s ineffective at solving the actual issue, which is reckless and impaired driving.
  - imgabe 3y ago
    Also as TFA pointed out, simply changing the setting of the existing limiter is not what they’re proposing: > NTSB’s proposed solution: Adopting Intelligent Speed Assist (ISA), a modern and techier version of the speed governors that Cincinnati considered a century ago. Rather than preventing a vehicle from ever exceeding a given threshold, ISA uses geolocation to automatically reflect the legal limit on a given street or highway. Someone has to compile this database of geolocations of every speed limit in the country and write software to fetch it and adjust the governor on the fly. That doesn’t cost $0.
    - oivey 3y ago
      That database already exists and many new cars have it anyway. My mid range Honda from 2018 has it, for example. Clearly, Honda and Acura wouldn’t need to develop such a thing, and I’m guessing neither would virtually any other manufacturer. Money isn’t the problem. If you ask people “should we increase the average cost of a car by $10 so that 15k fewer people die every year” most people will (correctly) answer yes. The issue is that it won’t save that many people, and it doesn’t do anything to solve the actual issue.
      - imgabe 3y ago
        There is still all the software to control the speed. It’s pretty astonishing that people here are naive enough to think that at any organization with the level of bureaucracy of the average car company this would cost $0. This isn’t your weekend side project where you change a few lines of code and push it to GitHub and it’s done. The meetings to begin to consider the change would probably cost a million dollars.
015a 3y ago
I don't feel that mechanically, or even electronically, affecting the engine behavior by installing a general purpose computer that is capable of reading from a centralized database of geolocated speed limits would cost, effectively, $0. Also, no one asserted that regulation always makes products more expensive.
- mattlondon 3y ago
  Many many cars already have something similar as a table stakes feature: they show the current speed limit that you are driving on, either via some of sort database and/or sign recognition. Adding a few lines of code to limit the speed to that +20mph or whatever would be almost zero cost
  - 015a 3y ago
    Sure. Expensive cars already have that. Car regulations have, almost universally, increased the cost of automobiles. The typical counter-argument to this is that it reduces the national cost-burden of an automobile-ized society by reducing the number of collisions and deaths; events of objective destruction that destroy value. Its a reasonable first-order argument, but it also feels too shallow to take entirely at face value, as it fails to consider the aggregate depreciation-value of the increased cost of automobiles after they're produced.

lll-o-lll 3y ago

It’s also incredibly stupid, like that US city that sold its parking meters to a private company and lost billions with a B. Here in Australia, the speeding problem is essentially solved with speed cameras and the like; which makes the government So Much Money. Not that I like this; it’s too much and is clearly revenue raising. Still, the point is that if you are a government, this is the way. It’s worked here anyway.