Originally Posted by
phinney
It should be technologically possible now to have cars limit their speed to the speed limit of the road they're on automatically. I really don't think it would take much to do this and would be a boon to safety for all travelers. Any thoughts?
Yeah we do have the technology to do that and safety wise it would be prudent, bigbrother. Blackbox for cars have been around for awhile now to measure driving behaviour and tracking via GPS, it wouldn't be too hard to add cruise control.
This is an article from 2003 about blackbox.
http://www.forbes.com/columnists/for.../0811/084.html
"The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) determined this while investigating a fatal accident that, based on the skid marks and appearance of the bent steel, appeared to have occurred at 23 miles per hour. Was there a design flaw? General Motors let the investigators know that the car had stored its speed at the time of crash. The estimate was off by more than a factor of two. The car was doing 50mph.
Remember the scare about sudden acceleration in Audis? With event data recorders, we would have known from the beginning that the drivers had their feet on the accelerator, not the brake. How about the Ford Explorer rollovers? We would know what the g-forces were at the time of an accident. Job one for fixing something is to understand what went wrong.
It isn't only that black boxes can make cars safer. They can also make safer drivers. The Berlin highway safety administration found that after the city's police department started using data recorders in their patrol cars, damage during rescue trips fell by 36%. Also in Germany, a taxi company installed these boxes in its fleet and collision rates fell by 66%. In the U.S., Sunstar Emergency Medical Services found that black boxes reduced its ambulance accidents by 95%. If there were a drug as effective in saving lives, people would be clamoring outside the Food & Drug Administration for its approval.
Just knowing the box is there changes drivers' behavior. Fear of getting caught may be a more powerful motivator than fear of getting killed. Better still, these devices give real-time feedback to drivers when they are doing something dangerous. Ricardo Martinez, the former head of the NHTSA, remembers his days working ambulances in Louisiana. The vehicles had something called a Growler. If he accelerated too fast or took a corner too hard, the machine would squawk. If he didn't slow down, it would squawk louder and make a record of the transgression. When he got back to base, he'd have to explain the indicators. The Growler made him drive more safely.
Larry H. Selditz, owner of Road Safety, a ten-year-old firm in Thousand Oaks, Calif., has taken the idea and made it available for the family car. As he points out, teenagers drive much better when their parents are sitting next to them. His black box device is always there watching the driver. When the kids come home, the parents can download driving information to review.
Road Safety has sold some 10,000 black boxes (at $4,000 a shot) to operators of ambulances, squad cars and other high-risk vehicles. On Sept. 8 the firm will launch a $280 consumer version. It won't have all the furbelows, but it will report on safety-belt use, acceleration/deceleration and four other measures of potentially unsafe driving. "