It's about time.

Speed limiter on a vehicle has been my first thing to check for a long time - no speed limiter, no purchase.

Shame that current cars seem to want to default to cruise control rather than a speed limiter.

What are you doing driving a vehicle you can't control the speed of?

I can control the speed... in fact I often find that I'm going 1mph below the speed limit. But it's sufficiently easy to just let speed run away that a limiter makes for a much simpler driving process -

I rarely have to glance at the dash, because I *know* that I am not exceeding the limit, even when going down a hill the vehicle automatically uses regen to hold the speed to the relevant limit.

What are you doing complaining about a system that helps you not break the law?

What are you doing complaining about a system that doesn't actually stop you doing anything?

Is it because you're a habitual law breaker who doesn't care about the danger they pose to others on the road?

The car I am getting as a ISA enabled, and during the test drive the damn thing kept on binging and bonging. I do know (from the sales rep) that there is a "favourite" setting which I can use to disable.

as for a speedlmiter as part of cruise control - yep, totally agree. Cruise is great, but in speed limited areas it is no use as the traffic flow moves from fast to slow and back again. It is too easy to be under the right foot and go with the flow and be over the said limit, speed limiter, no problems, accelarate and decelarte as needed and know you will not go over the limit (unless you kick down)

I am a great fan of cruise control - but in the present car the software is not up to the mark. I will set the CC to 62 MPH, but if I go down a gradual slope it will change down to slow the car to 62, even when the limit is 70, reducing efficiency badly.

And do not get me onto the auto cut out when stopped. WTF after the engine has cut out after I have braked to a standstill the engine starts when I put the handbrake ON. Seems perverse to me.

What's your point? CC is a limiter, not a magic button. If you ask for 62 mph, you get 62 mph, it doesn't know the road limit is higher

I could definitely appreciate CC that works on slopes, a low speed limit on a fairly steep slope is one of the most annoying times to ensure you're within the speed limit, on the flat it's easy.

Presumably in an EV, the cruise control can be an absolute velocity setpoint, and it would hit the hill and maintain its set speed with more rigid precision than a funicular tram

But maybe they deliberately slacken off the control gains to make it 'feel more like cruise control'

We received feedback that "it doesn't drive like me" as it maintained the set speed on the level, uphill and downhill - a significant number of drivers wanted the speed to drop on the up and rise on the down!

It was implemented to maintain the set speed, and that's now it remained.

"Presumably in an EV, the cruise control can be an absolute velocity setpoint, and it would hit the hill and maintain its set speed with more rigid precision than a funicular tram"

Pretty much - cruise control and speed limiter both work very well, because with a decent, and reversible, power source it's trivial to hold a speed.

Speed limiter on a vehicle has been my first thing to check for a long time - no speed limiter, no purchase.

I've had one in every car I've ever owned. It's permanently attached to my right leg and has always worked in conjunction with the car's rev or engine speed limiter.

Shame that current cars seem to want to default to cruise control rather than a speed limiter.

Actually if I had to have a car with a nannydriver, I'd want that linked to the cruise control. So if I were in Wales, it auto-sets the cruise control to 20mph so I can pootle around without scaring the sheep. Personally I don't really like either feature and I suspect it'll end up causing accidents. The idea that to override the speed limiter means having to stamp on the accelerator sounds dangerous. You press the accelerator firmly when you want to go really fast. Depends on car I guess but suppose I'm in a sporty little number and I want to overtake something going 60 on a 70mph road. A firm press probably means it'll end up going >70mph.

This seems pretty dumb. So someone sees a safe place to overtake, starts their manouver, car beeps at them, they stomp on the gas and by which point it's no longer safe to overtake. This could be especially FUN! in EVs with their high torque and acceleration. I guess it's been implemented this way because it's been the common way to override cruise control, but I've never liked that either. I want to be in control of my vehicles acceleration and deceleration, not reliant on some black box doing it's own thing.

Same here, I welcome this coming standard on all cars. I don't own a car any more and tend to hire one when I need one. As such I drive a dozen different models a year and I'm always pleased to find one that has it. I don't go looking for one with the feature but welcome it when it has one, like Lane Assist or ABS.

Especially when driving in unfamiliar parts of the country or abroad it's one less thing to think about. And it's been six years since I last had a speeding ticket.

As a Norwegian ralley driver said "it's nto the fart that kills you, it's the smell" ("det er ikke farten [=speed] som dreper deg, det er smellen [=the crash]")

More precisely: it is usually drivers not keeping a safe distance to the car ahead. Usually dark coloured cars (=company cars). Yes, speeding is a problem, and ffs, if there is a speed limit then don't try to actively push through traffic, just because you want to exceed the speed limit by more than most people are willing to pay for. I enjoy driving in Switzerland, tickets are so expensive that most keep their speed to about 130km/h on the highway (120km/h is the limit). It is almost relaxing (except for the bits around Basel, too many Germans).

See title.

If people are breaking local traffic laws, detect and punish them. Don't try and use technology that - per the article - manifestly doesn't yet work.

It really does work though, I was amazed by how welly partner's Nissan Qashqai was able to work out speed limits and not just from GPS/maps but by actually reading road signs (temporary speed limits and variable speed limits)

Ditto for the Volvo I had.

The technology works and is useful.

Eyeballs are also good at determining speed limits.

I'd love to see what a vision based system does in some UK motorway roadworks, especially in the smart sections. I have personally seen a section of smart motorway with roadworks where the physical signs by the side of the road say 50 and the gantry signs were also active and showing the national limit symbol.

I’ve had rentals with it enabled. It’s fair to say the technology has a long way to go.

Off the top of my head I’ve seen -

Grey speed signs in the Norwegian tunnels ignored.

Speed signs on side streets picked up

Signs and the other carriageway picked up

Temporary speed restrictions that are in overhead dynamic signage unrecognised

Temporary speed signs for roadworks not recognised

End of speed restrictions (ie 40 with a cross) not recognised.

Think I’ll stick to paying attention and mk1 eyeball

My car has sign recognition (doesn't act on it).

The favourite of it's to do is when driving on the motorway, is to identify the 50 sticker on the back of an HGV as a road sign at the side of the road.

My new car also has one of those sign readers. Half the time or more it shows its "don't know" indication. I've seen it register a sign correctly and then go to "don't know" a few seconds later. At one local cross-roads a national speed limit road crosses a 40 road. Approaching from the former there's a NSL sign opposite for the other half of the road. It sees than and registers it even when turning onto the 40. I've also seen it show 30 on a NSL dual carriageway & 60 in a 30 area.

But the biggest difficulty is working out iif and where speed limits change in the lanes. Past our house it's a turn off from a 30 road & still 30 with street lights etc. Then the street lights stop. No sign. What's the speed limit? Turn left at the next junction and eventually arrive at a junction with a 30 road. Street lights start a few hundred metres before but no sign. Carry on instead and arrive at a cross roads where there is a street light, part of a sequence to the right & straight ahead. Turn left and no more street lights. What's the speed limit? A mile or so later it joins a road which is undoubtedly NSL but there are no signs. Instead of left turn carry straight on. After a few hundred metres the street lights stop. No sign. What's the speed limit? Carry on and join the same NSL road. Convrsely, of course, you can turn off the NSL road & end up on 30 roads without encountering a sign. Where do the speed limits start and stop?

How will it deal with crossing the Irish border with MPH on one side & KPH on the other?

BYW does anyone know if stretches of the A75 still have signs with different speed limits for HGVs & other vehicles?

Conversely, someone I know was driving through Wales, and when people were vandalising the 20mph signs to read 80mph, the cars active cruise was happy start trying to accelerate to those speeds.

I'm in a forum and a couple of discords with a fair few people who own/drive new cars, and are interested in them and the tech in them, and the suggestion that the tech behind it speed aware active cruise, cameras, GPS, etc - the same used to operate the speed limiters - works maybe 80% of the time wasn't argued by anyone across those; it seems to be about their experience.

80%, frankly, just isn't good enough for something being enforced by law.

I foresee high profile limiter fails (ie misreading a pooly located side road speed sign on a dual carriageway and braking from 70mph to 30mph unexpectedly, causing a rear ender at speed etc) and these regulations being looked at more closely across the board.

I don't actually have a problem with speed limiters per se; I drive a fairly modern, quiet car with an auto gearbox (my first) after fifteen years of fairly loud manual cars and it's taken me a while to get used to regularly checking the speedo to verify my speed is sensible, rather than gauging speed based on what gear I'm in and the engine speed as I previously had, and I use the optional, manual speed limiter quite a lot - so I'd not mind an automatic system, but if I can't trust the automatic system it to get it right every time, then it's utterly useless.

Steven R

Edit: I see someone is going around downvoting anyone with valid criticisms of regulations implemented before the tech is ready. What a very strange hill to die on. Poorly implemented regulation is poorly implemented regulation, regardless of your presumed support for it - you should want it implemented when it's actually usable and supportable, not when it can be sacked off for being crap, then kicked into the long grass for another decade.

Some people just like the taste of boot :)

It will be interesting to see what happens when this is tested in court. 'I wasn't speeding cos my car let me go that fast'.

"80%, frankly, just isn't good enough for something being enforced by law."

See my post above - 80% seems pretty good!

"I see someone is going around downvoting anyone with valid criticisms of regulations implemented before the tech is ready."

Last time I looked this was primarily an IT site. One of the things a good developer learns (or used to!) is to question "what if" at very frequent intervals. What if the disk is full? What if the user enters an unexpected response? What happens if the item on an order gets nicked after it's been picked? If there are no good answers to these questions the software delivered will be at best unable to cope with the real world and more likely extremely buggy.

It's troubling when posts asking such obvious get downvoted in an IT forum.

If you can't produce a positive response (I'm assuming a lot of this activity is shilling) go back to your clients and tell them there are some serious issues they need to deal with PDQ.

My 2023 van came with this, and I find it very useful and have sailed past many hidden speed traps without getting a letter through the post, unlike my previous van. My only gripe is the system needs an ability to be calibrated. My van travels roughly 10% slower than the speed limit (when verified using GPS to work out the real speed versus what the speedometer says). This results in a tailback at best, and a 20 ton truck up my arse well within the minimum stopping distance at worst... frequently!

This law will be followed soon by the introduction of one mandating the use of a distance-enforcing system to maintain the gap between vehicles, as there will be a spate of speed-limit shunts where a speed-limited car travelling 2mph faster than the speed-limited car in front, closes the gap, and comes into contact.

On the one hand it sounds like more things to become faulty with a car and annoying false-positives trying to slow you down when it has mistaken the speed limit or has out of date maps etc. There is also the sense of "how dare it interfere with my driving."

On the other hand, there are so many crazy nut-jobs driving recklessly, I nearly got ploughed down the other day while crossing the road with my dogs as someone flew past me doing around 70 mph in a 30 mph residential street. I barely had time to get out of the way.

I've been sat at the lights at a pedestrian crossing and there has been a woman crossing the road in front of my car, and some almighty c**t in a Tesla shot past us in the lane next to me. She'd have been killed outright.

This speed limiter does nothing to stop cars running red lights. It does nothing to prevent dangerous driving.

Yes indeed. I nearly got hit recently in the scenario you describe. Traffic lights on red at a three lane junction. Pedestrian crossing on green to walk, I was just walking across the second lane when *whoosh* a car shot through in the third lane. Had I been a couple of steps further on she would have hit me at 30/40 mph. She looked preoccupied talking animatedly to her passenger and I'm guessing she didn't even see the red traffic light in front of her and was looking at traffic lights 20 yards further on which were on green.

Now you would think that everyone's time would be better spent on putting a camera on the car looking for traffic lights, and if it was going orange from green (or even red) it would slam the anchors on or alert the driver.

But no, we're more interested in making sure the car doesn't go above 30mph when running the red.

I drove a current model hire car recently that had this feature. It made the following mistakes in the few days I had it:

1) "End 50 area" was interpreted as 50.

2) "80 ahead" was interpreted as 80.

3) School zone signs were interpreted as 40 at all times of day.

We also have signs on the highways informing drivers entering the city of the blanket residential speed limit, but I didn't get a chance to drive past one of those.

Pretty half-baked technology.

Cars with this feature will also be sold in Northern Ireland, yet this is the only place where mph speed limits are on one side of a wiggly windy border and kph speed limits are on the other side. I wonder how that's going to work.

“School zone signs” , sounds like Oz? I forgot about those, our rental didn’t understand them too well

Most problems I see (and there was a fatal accident hear me recently) are caused by bad driving - nothing to do with speed. Don't get me wrong, there are many cases where speed is a problem, but often it is bad driving by one of the parties involved. And then there pedestrians. They do not look and just cross. I have lost count of how many accidents they have nearly caused me on my motorbike (and there is no speeding involved, just me in a bus lane or legally filtering - which you do not speed as it is too dangerous in London)

"While it is important to understand that the technology is still a driver aid and can easily be overridden, it is not hard to detect the direction of travel"

That's a relief, because negative speed would surely really confuse the system.

My speedometer reads 100 km/h when I'm doing 91. How does this tech deal with that?

Sounds like it's in spec then.

It doesn't. But your speedometer clearly needs fixing.

As far as I'm aware - all (non-GPS-based) speedometers are deliberately set to show a speed slightly higher than reality.

No idea if that's a legal thing, or just an attempt to prevent a certain amount of speeding by those who aren't aware.

(One Google later...)

"The UK law is based on the EU standard, with some minor changes. A speedo must never show less than the actual speed, and must never show more than 110% of actual speed + 6.25mph. So if your true speed is 40mph, your speedo could legally be reading up to 50.25mph but never less than 40mph."

(My car reads about 5% high, compared to GPS)

Last time I looked at UK Regulations for Motor Vehicles on the Queen's Highway - many years ago, now, the rule for speedos was no more than 15% over actual speed, no less than actual speed. Given that at the time the mechanical speedos had something of an S-shaped response curve, I suppose most makers just aimed for +7.5% at a nominal speed - 50 or 60mps.

Personally, I _hate_ instruments that lie to me (don't get me started on petrol gauges to the nearest ten litres!) but I guess that's just my engineering showing.

For the speedometer not to lie to you, it would need to know the wear level on the tyre to compensate for that. There's 1mph difference on my car between new tyres and the legal limit.

It's a legal thing. If you make 400,000 vehicles, do you test every one, or test a batch with them all over reading by say, 4%, at which point they are all legal.

Plus, what speed are you doing? The speed my car reports from the wheel sensor varies by 1mph between a fresh set of tyres, and one at the legal limit of the tread, the offset on the speedometer compensates for that too.

I would expect the variance in the speed sensors to be tenths of a percent, not full percentage points.

Mine's out by a similar margin. It's so far out that it's actually non-compliant with the relevant Australian Design Rule, but the manufacturer refuses to fix it.

An OBD-II scanner shows the same speed as a GPS device, so the ECU knows how fast the vehicle is moving, it just displays well out of spec information to the driver.

What did the mechanic say when you took it to be fixed? I mean, you have tried to get it fixed haven't you?

It probably needs a S/W update that doesn't exist. Less and less of this stuff is inaccessible to your local garage. John Deering is now standard practice.

And the next step to the nanny car will be what ? No shirt, no ignition ?

If I can't drive the way I want to, just give me private taxi that will do the job while I read a book.

Butm if I'm at the wheel, I decide what the car does and I'm responsible for it, not some effin' nanny back-seat driver.

Richard, it's like you were born to write this story!

If I hire an electric scooter in Bath the speed is capped depending on where I am, the same tech' should be applied to more dangerous vehicles.

Driving can be fun and if you especially enjoy speed book a track day and see how you compare to the track record for your age, vehicle class etc.

That reminds me of an old episode of Top Gear where Clarkson was driving a GT-R around Japan... the car knew where it was and automatically switched off all the limiters when he arrived at the Fuji racetrack.

Driver aids seem to make for a better quality idiot. This is probably down to dropping the standards here in the UK. You used to need to pass the Advanced Driver training with "Gold" before you could become a driving instructor. I see the effect of this daily driving between home and Cambridge. Lane hogs on the A14; vans drivers that either do 40 everywhere, or 90; EV drivers either in the way (lack of charge) or breaking every speed-limit; and long snakes of traffic stuck behind the van doing 40 as no-one seems to know how to overtake any more!

I would like to see driver aids banned. No more air-bags, no traction control, and no ABS. Learn to drive properly where those things are not needed. And yes, grumpy Gen X here whose first cars did not have ABS or air-bags; and who will be avoiding cars with these idiotic gadgets - or finding a way to disable them! Insulating tape on the cameras and a thin sheet of lead (Pb) on the GPS aerial should do it!

The RAC road safety spokesperson Rod Dennis said: "While it's not currently mandated that cars sold in the UK have to be fitted with Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) systems, we'd be surprised if manufacturers deliberately excluded the feature from those they sell in the UK as it would add unnecessary cost to production."

Eh? If the car doesn't know where it is, this system fails - so it should be a fairly trivial, one-off task to write a firmware function that disables the feature if it's not mandated in the country the vehicle is currently in. Hardly an added cost to production. Perhaps this RAC chap thinks the car would need to have some critical component/s retrofitted just to make it usable in the UK or wherever.

I'm neither for or against the idea of some form of ISA but, as a driver of some years, I get the impression driving standards are slipping. Not sure tech alone can do much to enhance them.

As an expat Pom living in NZ, and having just returned from a three week visit back to blighty, I noticed that nobody seems to cut the grass anymore. I lost count of the number of road signs obscured by grass or trees. The Qashqai I was driving had a feature that was supposed to recognise speed limit signs but a lot of the time it failed because they were hidden behind a hedge. Adaptive cruise control worker pretty well though, perhaps too well - it leaves you very little to do and that can be a tad soporific, which brings it's own problems.