A new bill in California would require car manufacturers to limit the speed on cars to a maximum of 10 miles per hour over the speed limit. That would mean no car sold could go over 80 mph.
This comes from the Speeding and Fatality Emergency Reduction on California Streets—or SAFER California Streets, for short. The bill’s sponsor, Scott Wiener, says that this is a response to a rise in traffic deaths. The solution, he says, is “speed governors.”
A speed governor is a technology called Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA), which uses GPS and on-board cameras to detect the speed limit of the road a driver is traveling and limit the driver’s ability to go more than 10 mph faster. It would also warn the driver “through audio, visual, or vibration signals and/or limiting vehicle speeds accordingly.” This would be required in all models made in 2027 and after.
In theory, this might sound nice but there are a few things that give me pause – like the ability to hack a car with this technology, which already exists. Or the possibility of trying to escape a natural disaster with limited speed. Maybe that one is apocalyptic? What do you think?
