3 ms·

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 ma

by 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.

by imgabe 3y ago

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.