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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 poin

by 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 oivey 3y ago

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.