I would guess that the answer to your question may have something to do with the fact that Automobile Manufacturers have very little concern with the laws that are in place (unless regulated). Though there are laws in place restricting speed, this does not require Auto Manufacturers to construct cars that are unable to break said laws. Ability vs. Action, I guess.
I know a Buck Rogers who drives a BMW. You wouldn’t be in the Atlanta area, would you?
No, Buck Rogers is just a forum name I use. NW Indiana here.
Sorry, I should not have even asked. Your post just contained a bunch of information that I knew to be consistent with a friend. I am a member of a few message boards that are a bit more informal than this one, and I forgot where I was for a second. Please accept my apologies.
my Altima is capped at about 110, I drove an older nissan (forget what make) that you couldnt set the cruise for higher than 90.
I fail to see what a speed limiter has to do with acceleration as some have posted, if you have a big engine theres nothing preventing you from taking off like a rocket if you want.
I like the idea of having this as a parental control. there is no reason Teens should ever need to drive over 80mph, if you tied it with a gps system you could probably make it scale down to any road.
speed is one of the top reasons kids crash, any dumbass can hit the gas pedal, it takes years of practice to control a car safely at excessive speeds and its something you can NEVER safely do on public roads.
I think that the simplest answer is the correct one. The number of people that really want limiters and/or think that 150 mph speeds are to blame for a large percentage of deaths, are relatively small compared to the people thet don’t want limiters at all and/or think that super-high-speed fatal accidents are not nearly the biggest problem in the realm of driving safety.
I see where you are coming from, but it doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen, mostly as a result of public opinion.
OTOH, I’d like to see a device that can effectively stop a fleeing car via it’s electrical system (for police use only). That seems to be a few years away.
There are products on the market that allow parents to monitor (via GPS) the average and maximum speed of the car that their teen is driving.
Mercedes, BMW and Audi (I think) all have speed limiters set to kick in at 250 km/h as standard across all model ranges. I don’t know if it’s only the Germany-spec models that have the limiter, but I do know that it isn’t mandatory.
The technology is there, and has been there for some years. Setting it to kick in at or just above the speed limit is not a good idea, for all the reasons Absolute mentions.
oh yeah I meant to quote this
for real yo!
Because people like to speed
IIRC, the 155mph limiter was put in place to appease the Greens in Germany. Its mentioned quite often in car magazines, the device is easily removed. Having autobahn is one reason to have a car capable of these high speeds I suppose.
The new Citroen C4 has a speed limiter controlled by the driver, but I’ve seen some mention of limiters controlled by satellite or activated by road signs on entering a town or city.
I seem to recall Clarkson trying to break 200mph on an autobahn, I think he bottled out at about 190mph. Anyway, you can bet the Germans would be annoyed if they had 90mph limiters put on all their cars and it would be a pain if German manufacturers had to make different versions of the same car to sell abroad.
Most car accidents are caused by one of three things: inattention, fatigue, or alcohol. Excessive speed, as has already been mentioned, is fairly low on the list of problematic driving behaviors.
As a data point, in the Detroit area the freeways have speed limits ranging from 55 mph up to 70 mph. Typical traffic speeds, however, are usually somewhere around 70 - 80 mph, and we don’t seem to have an unusual amount of accidents. Christ, even the cops don’t obey the 55 mph limits.
For $125 you can get a user-installable device [1] that will monitor the vehicle’s diagnostic bus and allow mom or dad to retrieve the vehicles fastest speed in the last day. It will also signal if it has been disconnected in that time period.
For right around $300 I could have custom ROM burnt and installed for my car’s computer. When you order the ROM, you can spec the top speed you want. I could have my Sable behave normally in every fashion, except that when it hit 80 it would refuse to go any faster.
It’s not the cars that make the roads safer or more dangerous. It’s the drivers of those vehicles. People need to learn again common sense and common curtesy(sp?) and realize that they need not run two feet from another car because they are not getting anywhere faster doing that.
I see plenty of BMWs, Mercedes-Benzs, Audis, and Volkswagens on the roads here- every single one of which is a “different version” of the European one, by virtue of being right-hand drive.
If BMW figure it’s worth their while making right-hand drive versions of their cars so rich people in the Former British Empire, Japan, and Thailand can buy them, I suspect they’ll see it as being worth their while to sell a speed limited version for the US market, if such a thing is ever mandated.
I don’t think Speed Limiters for cars are likely to become mandatory in Australia, for two major reasons- one, the Car Culture (petrolheads who love their cars), and two, the fact that in many places (notably in the Northern Territory) there aren’t any speed limits outside the urban areas (“Drive to suit conditions”), and even in places where there are nominally speed limits, there’s not a hell of a lot to crash into on the Nullarbor Plain or the Outback if you feel like driving at 200km/h…
It’s much the same reason why it’s legal for people on Learner’s Licences to drive around in big V8s or tricked out cars (in most places- I think NSW has some sort of power/torque restrictions which anyone on the Ls or Ps with a spare $20 can get an exemption from a the RTA)- because people here like cars and don’t want the Government telling them how to drive them or what they can and can’t do with them.
The reason why cars don’t have mandatory speed limiters is simple: Until you break the law, the government has no business intruding into commerce and your private life and controlling things.
If you want to go down the path of having the government manipulate our environment and products to keep us from abusing them, there are a lot of things they can start doing that you may not like.
As for speed limiters, most cars have them, even high performance ones. A big reason is tires and product liability. If a car has tires that are only rated to 130 mph, but the car is capable of 150, the manufacturer will often limit the car’s speed to the tire limit to prevent a high-speed blowout and subsequent lawsuits.
Sure. Why bother with a RFID system to shut down a speeding car when more revenue can be generated by using RFID identification to issue speeding tickets? In fact, you could set up multiple speed control setpoints along a stretch of road, say one per mile. If you exceed the speed limit for six miles, a cop never bothers to pull you over. You simply get six speeding tickets in the mail. RFID will remove any problems with identification that photo radar units have. The RFID wouldn’t be part of the car. It would be in the license plate. Car manufacturers won’t be bothered at all.
And why bother with just ticketing the driver? If an RFID chip is installed in the National ID that everyone has to carry, why not ticket all of them? After all, they are speeding too.
The passengers, that is.
There’s nothing wrong with capability. Your lawnmower has the capability to mow grass, but it could also mow over your neighbor’s flowerbed. It’s a matter of personal responsibility.
Vehicles may need to legitimately go fast when there is an emergency. Volunteer firefighters need to get around fast when there’s a fire or accident. Suppose you live 5 miles from the hospital and your child is injured. It would probably be faster to quickly and safely drive them to the hospital rather than wait for an ambulance.
There’s nothing wrong with having a vehicle that can go fast, it’s up to the individual if and when it does.